It describes a made-up concept that, as far as I can tell, does not actually map to any real phenomenon (mostly this is because Aella, perplexingly, lumps together obviously outright abusive behaviors with normal, unproblematic things that normal people do every day, and then declares this heterogeneous lump to be A Bad Thing)
Hmm, do you think frames are real phenomena / natural concepts? (As all concepts are made up, I assume you mean something like “natural” as the opposite.)
Different people use this term “frame” in different ways. (The usage in the OP seems to me to be a mix of confused and wrong.)
Without knowing what you mean by the word, I cannot answer your question.
(My guess, however, is that this is a motte-and-bailey situation, where there’s a banal sense of “frame” which is a real thing but not terribly interesting, and also a provocative sense which is tendentious, at best. But that is only a guess, for now.)
The meaning which makes the most sense to me in the context of this post is that a frame is just an ideology applied to a small interpersonal group, where an ideology is a set of ideas about what types of harms or disliked behaviors must be accepted as legitimate and what types may be responded to with self-protection or retaliation. When a political leader has ideas like that, it’s an ideology; when a meditation guru or father or boyfriend has them, it’s a frame. Or at least that’s how I’d try to steelman it.
One thing that clarified part of what’s up with the word “frame” is that I think there are (at least) three different metaphors people are using when they say frame: Picture Frame, Window Frame (or Lens), and Framework, which each have slightly different connotations. (They roughly correspond to ways of communicating, ways of seeing, and ways of thinking). But I do think people inadvertently use the ‘frame’ metaphor without noticing that they are using it in slightly different ways.
I think John Wentworth’s Shared Frames Are Capital Investments is a post with a more precise articulation of what a frame is and why it’s useful, which I think is (slightly) more likely to land for you.
I am unconvinced. It seems like a classic case of “you could think of it as” (cf. my reply to Vaniver). One major objection I had when reading was: “aren’t you just talking about discovering various important truths (and then figuring out important consequences of those truths)?” Wentworth gestures at this in one or two places, but does not really grapple with it. After reading the post, I still don’t see any particularly good reason to think of things in terms of “frames”. (It’s perhaps notable that there are no examples given either of competing “frames” which are, in some sense, both “correct”, nor of any cases of intentionally creating a useful “frame”—this despite the section on creating frames!)
I am increasingly convinced that this “frame” business is a red herring—and “frame control” doubly so.
I read the first linked post (yours) and it seemed… muddled. There’s some interesting points to be made here, clearly, but I’m afraid that I don’t think that you succeed at making them well; and I am not sure that the whole “frames” metaphor (?) is particularly productive there. Indeed, I think that those points may be made more sharply without trying to tie them to “frames” (or to each other via “frames”).
I have not yet read the other post; I will report back when I’ve done so.
So, according to me frames are a part of how people think about the world, and so it’s sort of hard to ground in words, mostly because of cognitive diversity. The concept is the mental generalization of frame of reference in physics and camera position and orientation in computer graphics (or real-world photography) to human perspectives.
So often people will have a ‘frame’ when they’re navigating the world; some things are salient, some things are ignored, there’s generally a dimension of value and relevance. This is particularly important for communication, because I’ll have some perception or conception in my frame, attempt to encode it into words, and then the reader will attempt to decode those words back into percepts and concepts. Sentences only make sense in context. The previous sentence was in English, for example, and someone trying to decode it using another language will be confused, but other, subtler contexts are also important. If I say something harsh to someone, this might be evidence that we’re enemies, or evidence that we’re close, and figuring out my meaning requires that additional detail.
Of course, with cameras we can talk about things like position and orientation and field of view and so on, and there are only a handful of variables. For human frames, there are many more variables that we understand in a less formal way, and so it becomes much harder to discuss.
IMO if you don’t think frames are real, you’re probably not going to think frame control is real. I think frames are a useful model, and so I think frame control (wherein one participant in a conversation is attempting to take control of the other participant’s frames) is also a useful model. [It is not obvious to me that frames are “the most obvious” model, or clearly carve reality at the joints, but I don’t have a better model yet.]
That said, I think there are lots of ‘design details’ that are hard to be clear on. Most communication, for example, involves trying to add details to the other person’s mind, and adding details is a way to ‘take control’, and so being totally against frame control basically means being totally against communication. One might try some simple rules like “things that attempt to delete details from the other person’s mind, or prevent them from changing their camera position, are frame control”, but I think this ends up proving too much, in that it militates against policing contradictions (and dissuading biases more generally). [Incidentally, I think this is where some ‘woke’ pushback against ‘rationality’ and ‘logic’ comes from, as it rhymes with frame control / is used to counter “lived experience”.]
There are two problems I see: one with “frames”, and one with “frame control”.
Re: “frames”: here we have a (fairly typical, I think) instance of what I think of as the “you could think of it as” approach. This is where we have some posited concept, and in explanation of it, a proponent says “well, you could think of it as [some characterization / some conceptual structure / some supposed dynamics / whatever]”. The problem is: sure, maybe you could think of things in that way. But so what? You could also just as easily not think of things in that way.
Why should you, after all? You could think of lots of things in lots of different ways, after all. What’s so special about this one? Does it allow you to make unusually accurate predictions? Does it allow you to compress / transmit information unusually efficiently / accurately? Or does it, perhaps, instead provoke you into false analogies, mistaken conclusions, salience distortion errors, or flawed reasoning of other sorts? And, just as importantly, is there any particular reason why you should only think of things in that way, and not instead in some other way?
So, you can talk about supposed “frames” that we use when navigating the world, etc. Yes. You can think of things in that way. But is anything particularly special about this way of looking at the world? Predictions we can make, that we can’t make otherwise? Concise and accurate ways of describing situations, phenomena, etc., that otherwise are difficult to describe? Conversely, are there distortions we introduce by talking about “frames” and thinking in terms of “frames”?
These are not necessarily rhetorical questions! But they are pertinent questions, because stuff like “frames” just isn’t obviously correct / predictive / true / etc. It’s a way of looking at things. Maybe a useful one—but still just that. Reification is the danger here! It does not do to forget that this is just one perspective, and not at all a uniquely compelling one.
So, bottom line—my answer to “are frames real?” is “Eh. There’s some good points to be made here, sure.” A “natural” concept? I’m skeptical. Certainly it seems to me that if I think and talk about the world without mentioning “frames” (nor any stand-in concept), I will not have any large holes in my portrayal. Certain aspects of the picture may be blurrier, more awkwardly drawn; certain other aspects may be sharper, and shown more accurately. Everything that should be there will basically be there, though.
Re: “frame control”: it’s not out of the question that some sort of phenomenon, of some description, that could plausibly be named “frame control”, might be a real thing (under some account of “frames”, etc.). I can imagine certain such things, if I tried. Such a phenomenon might be bad; it might be good, and desirable; it might be neutral; it would depend on the particulars. I can imagine two different people coming up with a characterization of something that they each called “frame control”, but with the two descriptions being of two totally different (perhaps largely unrelated!) phenomena—and one of these might be clearly good, one clearly bad, etc.
But the description in the OP is incoherent and nonsensical. The post does not usefully describe anything real, as far as I can tell. There are various details, thrown together to create a picture that makes no sense. As it is described (or attempted to be described) in the OP, “frame control” is not a thing.
My reply was getting long, so I’m going to break it into a few different comments. (woo threading)
The problem is: sure, maybe you could think of things in that way. But so what? You could also just as easily not think of things in that way.
Yeah; suppose I said “you can think of an elephant as a very large person with a single tentacle for a hand.” This will both capture something real about elephants, imply some things that are false about elephants, and point at many possibilities that are not realized on Earth. Without some actual elephants (and non-elephants) to look at, you’ll end up like the medieval bestiary artist.
What’s so special about this one? Does it allow you to make unusually accurate predictions? Does it allow you to compress / transmit information unusually efficiently / accurately? Or does it, perhaps, instead provoke you into false analogies, mistaken conclusions, salience distortion errors, or flawed reasoning of other sorts?
IMO having frames as a model helps counteract a naive bias in language, which is pointed at with 2-Place and 1-Place Words. If Fred describes a woman as sexy, I see that as a fact both about Fred’s frame and about the woman’s projection into Fred’s frame (in the geometrical / mathematical sense). General semantics makes a big deal out of this sort of ‘consciousness of projection’, and they recommend including markers of it in speech (as seems helpful when one isn’t operating in a context where the listeners would insert that by default). A bit from People in Quandaries:
Semantically, there is a great difference, for example, between saying “Poetry is silly” and “Poetry is silly—to me.” The latter leaves poetry a leg to stand on, as it were. It reminds both the speaker and the listener that the speaker is necessarily talking about himself as well as about poetry.
I think the majority of the value comes not from simple communication tricks, but the inferences upstream and downstream of communication; “what frame could cause Fred to emit that sort of sentence?”, “what can I say that will land in Fred’s frame?”, “how can I direct Fred’s attention to his own frame?”, “what’s going on with my frame around this?”, or so on.
It does not do to forget that this is just one perspective, and not at all a uniquely compelling one.
Yeah, I do think there’s something pretty ironic about taking a device that’s designed to ward against projective universality and project that it’s universal.
That said, I think there is a limited sort of universality. Suppose we’re talking about point objects in a 3d space, all of them will have position coordinates, but not everything will have position coordinates (because not everything is a point object in 3d space).
I feel pretty good about statements like “humans sense the world (the ‘territory’) through their sensorium and infer mental constructs (the ‘map’) from those sensations in a multi-layered way” and see how frames fit into that picture (roughly, the whole strategy of sensation → mental constructs, tho often we’ll be interested in the consciously accessible bit at the end that goes from percepts to concepts, or how concepts relate to each other, or how our memories relate to concepts).
That picture has some flexibility to it that makes it not very constraining. For example, the “sensorium” is defined by what it does rather than what it is, so when you show me a new sense organ the picture adapts instead of breaks, which means it’s not asserting I’ve found all the sense organs.
Such a phenomenon might be bad; it might be good, and desirable; it might be neutral; it would depend on the particulars. I can imagine two different people coming up with a characterization of something that they each called “frame control”, but with the two descriptions being of two totally different (perhaps largely unrelated!) phenomena—and one of these might be clearly good, one clearly bad, etc.
My guess is the ‘natural’ version of frame control is neutral, and is mostly about interpersonal dependency. (That is, what Alice thinks about X is downstream of what Bob thinks about X, and we can look at the mechanisms by which the influence flows.) There’s then another natural distinction into the various sorts of influence relationships, some of which are mutualistic (“leadership”) and some of which are predatory or exploitative or simply destructive, and in order to differentiate between those you need a large and complicated theory of ethics and interpersonal relationships, and these things will be interdependent. (Whether or not something counts as an ‘attack’ might depend on the relationship between two of the parties, but you might want to figure out their relationship by counting up the number of attacks.)
You can probably imagine an employer-employee relationship that’s good for both parties, and then smoothly vary features until you get a relationship that’s only good for one party, and continue varying features until you get a relationship that’s good for neither party. There will be some areas where you’re uncertain in between the areas where you’re certain, and probably substantial disagreement between observers on where those boundaries actually are.
This all seems reasonable. I don’t know that it would be particularly productive to use the phrase “frame control” to refer to any of the things you’re describing, or to think of them in terms of “frames”, etc. But yes, there are clearly various phenomena, more or less related to things mentioned in the OP, that do exist / occur (and I think your brief sketch shows something like the right direction in which to explore them, were we inclined to do so).
Certainly it seems to me that if I think and talk about the world without mentioning “frames” (nor any stand-in concept), I will not have any large holes in my portrayal.
I’m curious how you would argue something like 2-Place and 1-Place Words without using frames or a stand-in. [According to me (and another), the word ‘perspective’ is a stand-in.]
When I go through and try to figure out where Eliezer does it, I’m not sure he does, but also I don’t think it really counts as an argument. He simply asserts Fred’s error in treating sexiness as a function of two arguments instead of a function of one argument, or in identifying Fred::Sexiness as the one true Sexiness. But if Fred responds “I’m not making an error, I am using the one true Sexiness”, I think pointing out what failure of imagination Fred is doing will go much faster if talking about ‘perspective’.
[According to me (and another), the word ‘perspective’ is a stand-in.]
Well… I disagree. I guess that’s pretty much my answer?
When I go through and try to figure out where Eliezer does it, I’m not sure he does, but also I don’t think it really counts as an argument.
Well, take this paragraph (and the several after it):
An alternative and equally valid standpoint is that “sexiness” does refer to a one-place function—but each speaker uses a different one-place function to decide who to kidnap and ravish. Who says that just because Fred, the artist, and Bloogah, the bug-eyed monster, both use the word “sexy”, they must mean the same thing by it?
And then again:
And the two 2-place and 1-place views can be unified using the concept of “currying”, named after the mathematician Haskell Curry. … A true purist would insist that all functions should be viewed, by definition, as taking exactly 1 argument. On this view […]
Are these “frames”, or “frame shifts”, etc.? If not: why not? If so: why did you not recognize them as such?
The fact is that “frames” comes with all sorts of conceptual baggage, which, it seems to me, is clearly inapplicable in the case of the linked post (and many—perhaps most?—other cases). Eliezer suggests all sorts of what we might call “perspective shifts” throughout the post; none of them are total or radical shifts; and we could instead just call them “ways of looking at this particular thing”, or just “ideas”, etc.
Or what if I suggested unifying the various (somewhat half-baked) programming analogies Eliezer uses, to take an “object-oriented programming” view of the matter? For example, maybe the right way to look at “Sexiness” is like this: [Fred sexiness:Woman] (Objective C syntax being the appropriate one to use for this, naturally). This would, for instance, make it obvious that Woman.sexiness is nonsense, because sexiness is a method we’re calling on Fred, with the parameter Woman (rather than some sort of “property” “of” Woman); so perhaps there are conceptual advantages to be gained from this re-framing. Aha! I said “re-framing”! So is that a new “frame”? Am I unable to escape talk of “frames” after all?! Eh; it’s a figure of speech, and a fairly “lightweight” one.
Perhaps my problem with “frames” can be thought of (there’s that “we can think of it as” business again!) as objecting to making too big a deal of something. We “play with” ideas, when we think about things like this; we turn them this way and that, adopt various perspectives, phrase things in different ways, apply different metaphors, deploy various analogies. This is fine and normal, and also it is a core feature of our cognition, and it has many aspects, many features—which means that it’s good to retain an “unburdened” view of it, the better to notice its various qualities, and the better to avoid impeding its functioning. I do not think it pays to start scrutinizing this extremely general phenomenon in such a way that we attach to it a “heavyweight” concept like “frames”, with much philosophical baggage and so on. That can only “weigh down” our thinking unnecessarily.
In short, perhaps the real takeaway here is that “frames” is… a bad frame.
Are these “frames”, or “frame shifts”, etc.? If not: why not? If so: why did you not recognize them as such?
Sorry, I think my previous sentence was unclear. I think 2-Place and 1-Place Words uses without formalizing the thing I am trying to point at with “frames”, and so when I imagine that article without any pointers to frames, I don’t think it’s convincing (and I’m not sure how Eliezer would have thought of it in the first place without something like frames).
For example, in the paragraph you quote he uses the word “standpoint.” When I interpret that as “the position and orientation of the metaphorical camera through which the situation is observed”, i.e. a stand-in for frames, the sentence compiles and the paragraph makes sense. When I delete that meaning, the paragraph now seems confused.
[Put another way, if I don’t come into that article with the sense that different observers can assign sexiness differently, the article doesn’t generate that sense. It uses that sense to explain something about language. This would maybe be more obvious if we swapped out ‘sexiness’ for something like ‘justice’, and imagine the article being read by a moral realist who is convinced that there is one true Justice.]
The fact is that “frames” comes with all sorts of conceptual baggage, which, it seems to me, is clearly inapplicable in the case of the linked post (and many—perhaps most?—other cases).
This seems interesting to me. Let’s consider the alternative post Aella could have written which talks about “perspective control”; I suspect it hits many of the same points and has many of the same conclusions. [If it seems more or less valid to you, that seems like it would be good to hear!]
In particular, imagine an architect trying to get their building design to win a competition, but they think their building is pretty from the south and ugly from the east; they might make lots of moves that by themselves are innocuous and yet add up to controlling the judges so that they have an overly positive view of the design. If we wanted to talk about what that architect is doing wrong, I think ‘perspective control’ might be a solid label.
I think what happens when we use ‘frame’ instead of ‘perspective’ is that we’re generalizing. Our architect controlled which part of the design the judges saw, but they could also try to control something like “how the judges think about design”; saying something about how minimalism is futuristic might cause the judges to not dock points for the lack of embellishments because they don’t want to be seen as stuck in the past. The strategic aim is roughly the same as the architect trying to not have the judges see the east face of the building, but the tactical methodology is quite different and operating on a different level of cognition. [One could still talk about “minimalism as futuristic” as being part of one’s perspective or standpoint or so on, but this is now clearly in a metaphorical rather than literal sense.]
Possibly this is where the conceptual baggage comes in? Now, rather than just having a simple physical analogy for visual cognition, we have to analogize across the whole cognitive and interpersonal stack. It might be better to keep different layers and regions separate, tho this is genuinely harder because not everyone will have arranged their cognitive and interpersonal stacks in the same way, and organisms live end-to-end in a way that makes the systems less truly modular than the human reverse-engineer would hope.
The thing is, if “frame” is just another way of saying [insert list of various ways of saying “people sometimes think about a thing in one way and sometimes in another way”], then the concept is so diffuse, general, and banal as to not be worth elevating to any special status.
Eliezer’s post “uses without formalizing” this concept, as you say, but consider: what if he had formalized it? Would it be a better post, or a worse one? I say: worse!
Possibly this is where the conceptual baggage comes in? Now, rather than just having a simple physical analogy for visual cognition, we have to analogize across the whole cognitive and interpersonal stack. It might be better to keep different layers and regions separate, tho this is genuinely harder because not everyone will have arranged their cognitive and interpersonal stacks in the same way, and organisms live end-to-end in a way that makes the systems less truly modular than the human reverse-engineer would hope.
I think you have it, yes.
In general I think that abstractions should serve a clear purpose; like beliefs, they should “pay rent” (in compression ratios, for instance, or expressiveness).
And the thing is, “our sort of people”—not “rationalists”, but, shall we say, “the kind of person that [many/most] rationalists are”—generate abstractions instinctively. To us, noticing a pattern, coming up with a clever abstraction, building a mental castle of concepts around it—it’s not even second nature; it’s just plain nature. We don’t have to remind ourselves to do this.
But this means that many abstractions we come up with are going to be superfluous… or, at the very least, while they may be useful in a transient act of cognition, do not deserve to be brought out into the light, ensconced in a public gallery of “community abstractions”, where they can sit around and shape everyone’s thinking for years to come.
“Frames” are like that, I think.
It seems to me that “frames” are quite likely to be delinquent with their rent… precisely because they are so general and so fuzzy a concept, precisely because there are so many “stand-ins”, so many ways of pointing at the same phenomena.
On the other hand, “frame control” is quite a heavyweight concept! This is an odd mismatch, is it not? Notice that “frame control” demands that “frame” have a much more specific meaning than what we’ve been discussing in this subthread. Once you say that someone can “control” your “frame”, you can no longer be talking about something so general and ordinary as “different ways of looking at something”; you’ve got to be positing some more substantive theory of how people see and think about the world, and then adding to that the notion that someone can “control” that, etc.
The thing is, if “frame” is just another way of saying [insert list of various ways of saying “people sometimes think about a thing in one way and sometimes in another way”], then the concept is so diffuse, general, and banal as to not be worth elevating to any special status.
Huh, I find this surprising, mostly because I’m not sure about the “special status” claim.
It seems to me like there’s something of a dilemma here—either the concept is obvious (at which point being diffuse or general is not much of a drawback), and so the problem with the post is that it is ‘reinventing the wheel’, or the concept is nonobvious (and thus we can’t be sure we’re pointing at the same thing, and being diffuse now makes this communication much more difficult). Up until this point, I had gotten the second impression from you (stuff like “Without knowing what you mean by the word, I cannot answer your question.”), and not something like “wait, is this just rediscovering ‘maps’ from the map-territory distinction?”.
Also, I think that while this sort of “noticing maps” is basic rationality, it empirically does not seem obvious to everyone, and I think people finding it non-obvious or difficult to talk about or so on is interesting. That is, I don’t see this post as trying to make “frame” any more special a word than “perspective” or “standpoint” or so on; I see this post as trying to make more people both 1) see frame differences and 2) see frame manipulation, especially the sort of frame manipulation that tries to not be seen as frame manipulation.
[To be clear, I share some of your sense that ‘someone who had traumatic experiences around frame manipulation’ is probably not an unbiased source of information/frames about frames, and is likely more allergic / less likely to see that the same knife can be used constructively and destructively. I nevertheless put frames in the “general, basic, and useful concept” category, whereas you seem pretty sure they’re a bad frame.]
Hmm, do you think frames are real phenomena / natural concepts? (As all concepts are made up, I assume you mean something like “natural” as the opposite.)
Different people use this term “frame” in different ways. (The usage in the OP seems to me to be a mix of confused and wrong.)
Without knowing what you mean by the word, I cannot answer your question.
(My guess, however, is that this is a motte-and-bailey situation, where there’s a banal sense of “frame” which is a real thing but not terribly interesting, and also a provocative sense which is tendentious, at best. But that is only a guess, for now.)
The meaning which makes the most sense to me in the context of this post is that a frame is just an ideology applied to a small interpersonal group, where an ideology is a set of ideas about what types of harms or disliked behaviors must be accepted as legitimate and what types may be responded to with self-protection or retaliation. When a political leader has ideas like that, it’s an ideology; when a meditation guru or father or boyfriend has them, it’s a frame. Or at least that’s how I’d try to steelman it.
One thing that clarified part of what’s up with the word “frame” is that I think there are (at least) three different metaphors people are using when they say frame: Picture Frame, Window Frame (or Lens), and Framework, which each have slightly different connotations. (They roughly correspond to ways of communicating, ways of seeing, and ways of thinking). But I do think people inadvertently use the ‘frame’ metaphor without noticing that they are using it in slightly different ways.
I think John Wentworth’s Shared Frames Are Capital Investments is a post with a more precise articulation of what a frame is and why it’s useful, which I think is (slightly) more likely to land for you.
I have now read John Wentworth’s post.
I am unconvinced. It seems like a classic case of “you could think of it as” (cf. my reply to Vaniver). One major objection I had when reading was: “aren’t you just talking about discovering various important truths (and then figuring out important consequences of those truths)?” Wentworth gestures at this in one or two places, but does not really grapple with it. After reading the post, I still don’t see any particularly good reason to think of things in terms of “frames”. (It’s perhaps notable that there are no examples given either of competing “frames” which are, in some sense, both “correct”, nor of any cases of intentionally creating a useful “frame”—this despite the section on creating frames!)
I am increasingly convinced that this “frame” business is a red herring—and “frame control” doubly so.
Thank you for the links.
I read the first linked post (yours) and it seemed… muddled. There’s some interesting points to be made here, clearly, but I’m afraid that I don’t think that you succeed at making them well; and I am not sure that the whole “frames” metaphor (?) is particularly productive there. Indeed, I think that those points may be made more sharply without trying to tie them to “frames” (or to each other via “frames”).
I have not yet read the other post; I will report back when I’ve done so.
So, according to me frames are a part of how people think about the world, and so it’s sort of hard to ground in words, mostly because of cognitive diversity. The concept is the mental generalization of frame of reference in physics and camera position and orientation in computer graphics (or real-world photography) to human perspectives.
So often people will have a ‘frame’ when they’re navigating the world; some things are salient, some things are ignored, there’s generally a dimension of value and relevance. This is particularly important for communication, because I’ll have some perception or conception in my frame, attempt to encode it into words, and then the reader will attempt to decode those words back into percepts and concepts. Sentences only make sense in context. The previous sentence was in English, for example, and someone trying to decode it using another language will be confused, but other, subtler contexts are also important. If I say something harsh to someone, this might be evidence that we’re enemies, or evidence that we’re close, and figuring out my meaning requires that additional detail.
Of course, with cameras we can talk about things like position and orientation and field of view and so on, and there are only a handful of variables. For human frames, there are many more variables that we understand in a less formal way, and so it becomes much harder to discuss.
IMO if you don’t think frames are real, you’re probably not going to think frame control is real. I think frames are a useful model, and so I think frame control (wherein one participant in a conversation is attempting to take control of the other participant’s frames) is also a useful model. [It is not obvious to me that frames are “the most obvious” model, or clearly carve reality at the joints, but I don’t have a better model yet.]
That said, I think there are lots of ‘design details’ that are hard to be clear on. Most communication, for example, involves trying to add details to the other person’s mind, and adding details is a way to ‘take control’, and so being totally against frame control basically means being totally against communication. One might try some simple rules like “things that attempt to delete details from the other person’s mind, or prevent them from changing their camera position, are frame control”, but I think this ends up proving too much, in that it militates against policing contradictions (and dissuading biases more generally). [Incidentally, I think this is where some ‘woke’ pushback against ‘rationality’ and ‘logic’ comes from, as it rhymes with frame control / is used to counter “lived experience”.]
There are two problems I see: one with “frames”, and one with “frame control”.
Re: “frames”: here we have a (fairly typical, I think) instance of what I think of as the “you could think of it as” approach. This is where we have some posited concept, and in explanation of it, a proponent says “well, you could think of it as [some characterization / some conceptual structure / some supposed dynamics / whatever]”. The problem is: sure, maybe you could think of things in that way. But so what? You could also just as easily not think of things in that way.
Why should you, after all? You could think of lots of things in lots of different ways, after all. What’s so special about this one? Does it allow you to make unusually accurate predictions? Does it allow you to compress / transmit information unusually efficiently / accurately? Or does it, perhaps, instead provoke you into false analogies, mistaken conclusions, salience distortion errors, or flawed reasoning of other sorts? And, just as importantly, is there any particular reason why you should only think of things in that way, and not instead in some other way?
So, you can talk about supposed “frames” that we use when navigating the world, etc. Yes. You can think of things in that way. But is anything particularly special about this way of looking at the world? Predictions we can make, that we can’t make otherwise? Concise and accurate ways of describing situations, phenomena, etc., that otherwise are difficult to describe? Conversely, are there distortions we introduce by talking about “frames” and thinking in terms of “frames”?
These are not necessarily rhetorical questions! But they are pertinent questions, because stuff like “frames” just isn’t obviously correct / predictive / true / etc. It’s a way of looking at things. Maybe a useful one—but still just that. Reification is the danger here! It does not do to forget that this is just one perspective, and not at all a uniquely compelling one.
So, bottom line—my answer to “are frames real?” is “Eh. There’s some good points to be made here, sure.” A “natural” concept? I’m skeptical. Certainly it seems to me that if I think and talk about the world without mentioning “frames” (nor any stand-in concept), I will not have any large holes in my portrayal. Certain aspects of the picture may be blurrier, more awkwardly drawn; certain other aspects may be sharper, and shown more accurately. Everything that should be there will basically be there, though.
Re: “frame control”: it’s not out of the question that some sort of phenomenon, of some description, that could plausibly be named “frame control”, might be a real thing (under some account of “frames”, etc.). I can imagine certain such things, if I tried. Such a phenomenon might be bad; it might be good, and desirable; it might be neutral; it would depend on the particulars. I can imagine two different people coming up with a characterization of something that they each called “frame control”, but with the two descriptions being of two totally different (perhaps largely unrelated!) phenomena—and one of these might be clearly good, one clearly bad, etc.
But the description in the OP is incoherent and nonsensical. The post does not usefully describe anything real, as far as I can tell. There are various details, thrown together to create a picture that makes no sense. As it is described (or attempted to be described) in the OP, “frame control” is not a thing.
My reply was getting long, so I’m going to break it into a few different comments. (woo threading)
Yeah; suppose I said “you can think of an elephant as a very large person with a single tentacle for a hand.” This will both capture something real about elephants, imply some things that are false about elephants, and point at many possibilities that are not realized on Earth. Without some actual elephants (and non-elephants) to look at, you’ll end up like the medieval bestiary artist.
IMO having frames as a model helps counteract a naive bias in language, which is pointed at with 2-Place and 1-Place Words. If Fred describes a woman as sexy, I see that as a fact both about Fred’s frame and about the woman’s projection into Fred’s frame (in the geometrical / mathematical sense). General semantics makes a big deal out of this sort of ‘consciousness of projection’, and they recommend including markers of it in speech (as seems helpful when one isn’t operating in a context where the listeners would insert that by default). A bit from People in Quandaries:
I think the majority of the value comes not from simple communication tricks, but the inferences upstream and downstream of communication; “what frame could cause Fred to emit that sort of sentence?”, “what can I say that will land in Fred’s frame?”, “how can I direct Fred’s attention to his own frame?”, “what’s going on with my frame around this?”, or so on.
Yeah, I do think there’s something pretty ironic about taking a device that’s designed to ward against projective universality and project that it’s universal.
That said, I think there is a limited sort of universality. Suppose we’re talking about point objects in a 3d space, all of them will have position coordinates, but not everything will have position coordinates (because not everything is a point object in 3d space).
I feel pretty good about statements like “humans sense the world (the ‘territory’) through their sensorium and infer mental constructs (the ‘map’) from those sensations in a multi-layered way” and see how frames fit into that picture (roughly, the whole strategy of sensation → mental constructs, tho often we’ll be interested in the consciously accessible bit at the end that goes from percepts to concepts, or how concepts relate to each other, or how our memories relate to concepts).
That picture has some flexibility to it that makes it not very constraining. For example, the “sensorium” is defined by what it does rather than what it is, so when you show me a new sense organ the picture adapts instead of breaks, which means it’s not asserting I’ve found all the sense organs.
My guess is the ‘natural’ version of frame control is neutral, and is mostly about interpersonal dependency. (That is, what Alice thinks about X is downstream of what Bob thinks about X, and we can look at the mechanisms by which the influence flows.) There’s then another natural distinction into the various sorts of influence relationships, some of which are mutualistic (“leadership”) and some of which are predatory or exploitative or simply destructive, and in order to differentiate between those you need a large and complicated theory of ethics and interpersonal relationships, and these things will be interdependent. (Whether or not something counts as an ‘attack’ might depend on the relationship between two of the parties, but you might want to figure out their relationship by counting up the number of attacks.)
You can probably imagine an employer-employee relationship that’s good for both parties, and then smoothly vary features until you get a relationship that’s only good for one party, and continue varying features until you get a relationship that’s good for neither party. There will be some areas where you’re uncertain in between the areas where you’re certain, and probably substantial disagreement between observers on where those boundaries actually are.
This all seems reasonable. I don’t know that it would be particularly productive to use the phrase “frame control” to refer to any of the things you’re describing, or to think of them in terms of “frames”, etc. But yes, there are clearly various phenomena, more or less related to things mentioned in the OP, that do exist / occur (and I think your brief sketch shows something like the right direction in which to explore them, were we inclined to do so).
I’m curious how you would argue something like 2-Place and 1-Place Words without using frames or a stand-in. [According to me (and another), the word ‘perspective’ is a stand-in.]
When I go through and try to figure out where Eliezer does it, I’m not sure he does, but also I don’t think it really counts as an argument. He simply asserts Fred’s error in treating sexiness as a function of two arguments instead of a function of one argument, or in identifying Fred::Sexiness as the one true Sexiness. But if Fred responds “I’m not making an error, I am using the one true Sexiness”, I think pointing out what failure of imagination Fred is doing will go much faster if talking about ‘perspective’.
Well… I disagree. I guess that’s pretty much my answer?
Well, take this paragraph (and the several after it):
And then again:
Are these “frames”, or “frame shifts”, etc.? If not: why not? If so: why did you not recognize them as such?
The fact is that “frames” comes with all sorts of conceptual baggage, which, it seems to me, is clearly inapplicable in the case of the linked post (and many—perhaps most?—other cases). Eliezer suggests all sorts of what we might call “perspective shifts” throughout the post; none of them are total or radical shifts; and we could instead just call them “ways of looking at this particular thing”, or just “ideas”, etc.
Or what if I suggested unifying the various (somewhat half-baked) programming analogies Eliezer uses, to take an “object-oriented programming” view of the matter? For example, maybe the right way to look at “Sexiness” is like this:
[Fred sexiness:Woman](Objective C syntax being the appropriate one to use for this, naturally). This would, for instance, make it obvious thatWoman.sexinessis nonsense, becausesexinessis a method we’re calling onFred, with the parameterWoman(rather than some sort of “property” “of”Woman); so perhaps there are conceptual advantages to be gained from this re-framing. Aha! I said “re-framing”! So is that a new “frame”? Am I unable to escape talk of “frames” after all?! Eh; it’s a figure of speech, and a fairly “lightweight” one.Perhaps my problem with “frames” can be thought of (there’s that “we can think of it as” business again!) as objecting to making too big a deal of something. We “play with” ideas, when we think about things like this; we turn them this way and that, adopt various perspectives, phrase things in different ways, apply different metaphors, deploy various analogies. This is fine and normal, and also it is a core feature of our cognition, and it has many aspects, many features—which means that it’s good to retain an “unburdened” view of it, the better to notice its various qualities, and the better to avoid impeding its functioning. I do not think it pays to start scrutinizing this extremely general phenomenon in such a way that we attach to it a “heavyweight” concept like “frames”, with much philosophical baggage and so on. That can only “weigh down” our thinking unnecessarily.
In short, perhaps the real takeaway here is that “frames” is… a bad frame.
Sorry, I think my previous sentence was unclear. I think 2-Place and 1-Place Words uses without formalizing the thing I am trying to point at with “frames”, and so when I imagine that article without any pointers to frames, I don’t think it’s convincing (and I’m not sure how Eliezer would have thought of it in the first place without something like frames).
For example, in the paragraph you quote he uses the word “standpoint.” When I interpret that as “the position and orientation of the metaphorical camera through which the situation is observed”, i.e. a stand-in for frames, the sentence compiles and the paragraph makes sense. When I delete that meaning, the paragraph now seems confused.
[Put another way, if I don’t come into that article with the sense that different observers can assign sexiness differently, the article doesn’t generate that sense. It uses that sense to explain something about language. This would maybe be more obvious if we swapped out ‘sexiness’ for something like ‘justice’, and imagine the article being read by a moral realist who is convinced that there is one true Justice.]
This seems interesting to me. Let’s consider the alternative post Aella could have written which talks about “perspective control”; I suspect it hits many of the same points and has many of the same conclusions. [If it seems more or less valid to you, that seems like it would be good to hear!]
In particular, imagine an architect trying to get their building design to win a competition, but they think their building is pretty from the south and ugly from the east; they might make lots of moves that by themselves are innocuous and yet add up to controlling the judges so that they have an overly positive view of the design. If we wanted to talk about what that architect is doing wrong, I think ‘perspective control’ might be a solid label.
I think what happens when we use ‘frame’ instead of ‘perspective’ is that we’re generalizing. Our architect controlled which part of the design the judges saw, but they could also try to control something like “how the judges think about design”; saying something about how minimalism is futuristic might cause the judges to not dock points for the lack of embellishments because they don’t want to be seen as stuck in the past. The strategic aim is roughly the same as the architect trying to not have the judges see the east face of the building, but the tactical methodology is quite different and operating on a different level of cognition. [One could still talk about “minimalism as futuristic” as being part of one’s perspective or standpoint or so on, but this is now clearly in a metaphorical rather than literal sense.]
Possibly this is where the conceptual baggage comes in? Now, rather than just having a simple physical analogy for visual cognition, we have to analogize across the whole cognitive and interpersonal stack. It might be better to keep different layers and regions separate, tho this is genuinely harder because not everyone will have arranged their cognitive and interpersonal stacks in the same way, and organisms live end-to-end in a way that makes the systems less truly modular than the human reverse-engineer would hope.
The thing is, if “frame” is just another way of saying [insert list of various ways of saying “people sometimes think about a thing in one way and sometimes in another way”], then the concept is so diffuse, general, and banal as to not be worth elevating to any special status.
Eliezer’s post “uses without formalizing” this concept, as you say, but consider: what if he had formalized it? Would it be a better post, or a worse one? I say: worse!
I think you have it, yes.
In general I think that abstractions should serve a clear purpose; like beliefs, they should “pay rent” (in compression ratios, for instance, or expressiveness).
And the thing is, “our sort of people”—not “rationalists”, but, shall we say, “the kind of person that [many/most] rationalists are”—generate abstractions instinctively. To us, noticing a pattern, coming up with a clever abstraction, building a mental castle of concepts around it—it’s not even second nature; it’s just plain nature. We don’t have to remind ourselves to do this.
But this means that many abstractions we come up with are going to be superfluous… or, at the very least, while they may be useful in a transient act of cognition, do not deserve to be brought out into the light, ensconced in a public gallery of “community abstractions”, where they can sit around and shape everyone’s thinking for years to come.
“Frames” are like that, I think.
It seems to me that “frames” are quite likely to be delinquent with their rent… precisely because they are so general and so fuzzy a concept, precisely because there are so many “stand-ins”, so many ways of pointing at the same phenomena.
On the other hand, “frame control” is quite a heavyweight concept! This is an odd mismatch, is it not? Notice that “frame control” demands that “frame” have a much more specific meaning than what we’ve been discussing in this subthread. Once you say that someone can “control” your “frame”, you can no longer be talking about something so general and ordinary as “different ways of looking at something”; you’ve got to be positing some more substantive theory of how people see and think about the world, and then adding to that the notion that someone can “control” that, etc.
Huh, I find this surprising, mostly because I’m not sure about the “special status” claim.
It seems to me like there’s something of a dilemma here—either the concept is obvious (at which point being diffuse or general is not much of a drawback), and so the problem with the post is that it is ‘reinventing the wheel’, or the concept is nonobvious (and thus we can’t be sure we’re pointing at the same thing, and being diffuse now makes this communication much more difficult). Up until this point, I had gotten the second impression from you (stuff like “Without knowing what you mean by the word, I cannot answer your question.”), and not something like “wait, is this just rediscovering ‘maps’ from the map-territory distinction?”.
Also, I think that while this sort of “noticing maps” is basic rationality, it empirically does not seem obvious to everyone, and I think people finding it non-obvious or difficult to talk about or so on is interesting. That is, I don’t see this post as trying to make “frame” any more special a word than “perspective” or “standpoint” or so on; I see this post as trying to make more people both 1) see frame differences and 2) see frame manipulation, especially the sort of frame manipulation that tries to not be seen as frame manipulation.
[To be clear, I share some of your sense that ‘someone who had traumatic experiences around frame manipulation’ is probably not an unbiased source of information/frames about frames, and is likely more allergic / less likely to see that the same knife can be used constructively and destructively. I nevertheless put frames in the “general, basic, and useful concept” category, whereas you seem pretty sure they’re a bad frame.]