treating reality as fixed and self as fixed and the discovery of the proper mapping between self concepts and reality concepts is doomed to failure because both your own intentions are fluid depending on what you are trying to do and your own sense of reality is fluid (including self model). Ontologies are built to be thrown away. They break in the tails. Fully embracing and extending the Wittgensteinian revolution prevents you from wasting effort resisting this.
This seems technically true but not relevant. Important classes of intersubjective coordination require locally stable category boundaries, and some ontologies have more variation we care about concealed in the tails than others.
There are processes that tend towards the creation of ontologies with stable expressive power, and others that make maps worse for navigation. It’s not always expedient to cooperate with the making of a map that lets others find you, but it’s important to be able to track which way you’re pushing if you want there to sometimes be good maps.
I’m saying that this post itself is falling prey to the thing it advises against. Better to point at a cluster that helps navigate, like Hanson’s babblers than to talk about the information theoretic content of aggregate clusters.
It seems to me like the OP is motivated by a desire to improve decisionmaking processes by making a decisive legal argument against corruption in front of a corrupt court, and that this is an inefficient way of coordinating to move people who are reachable to a better equilibrium.
Does that seem like substantively the same objection to you?
I found parts of the post object-level helpful, like the bit I directly commented on, but overall agree it’s giving LW too much credit for coordinating towards “Rationality.” But people like Zack will correctly believe that LW’s corruption is not common knowledge if people like us aren’t willing to state the obvious explicitly.
treating reality as fixed and self as fixed and the discovery of the proper mapping between self concepts and reality concepts is doomed to failure because both your own intentions are fluid depending on what you are trying to do and your own sense of reality is fluid (including self model). Ontologies are built to be thrown away. They break in the tails. Fully embracing and extending the Wittgensteinian revolution prevents you from wasting effort resisting this.
This seems technically true but not relevant. Important classes of intersubjective coordination require locally stable category boundaries, and some ontologies have more variation we care about concealed in the tails than others.
There are processes that tend towards the creation of ontologies with stable expressive power, and others that make maps worse for navigation. It’s not always expedient to cooperate with the making of a map that lets others find you, but it’s important to be able to track which way you’re pushing if you want there to sometimes be good maps.
I’m saying that this post itself is falling prey to the thing it advises against. Better to point at a cluster that helps navigate, like Hanson’s babblers than to talk about the information theoretic content of aggregate clusters.
It seems to me like the OP is motivated by a desire to improve decisionmaking processes by making a decisive legal argument against corruption in front of a corrupt court, and that this is an inefficient way of coordinating to move people who are reachable to a better equilibrium.
Does that seem like substantively the same objection to you?
I found parts of the post object-level helpful, like the bit I directly commented on, but overall agree it’s giving LW too much credit for coordinating towards “Rationality.” But people like Zack will correctly believe that LW’s corruption is not common knowledge if people like us aren’t willing to state the obvious explicitly.
Yeah, pointing at the same stuff. That clarification helped.