(The parent is a long comment and makes several points, so I’m going to answer it in several parts. This is part 1.)
That is, it seems to me like your second category of explanation (the “practical, specific, and circumscribed” type) matches on to the ritual behavior explanation
I object in the strongest terms to characterizing this sort of explanation and this sort of knowledge as “ritual behavior”. In fact, not only does it constitute real understanding of the problem at hand (and the problem domain in general)—the kind of understanding that lets you accomplish real-world goals, and improvise, and predict the outcomes of processes and of actions, etc.—but it almost always constitutes a greater and a deeper understanding that the sort of explanation which tries to be more broad, more “from first principles”, more interdisciplinary, etc.
but your first category of explanation (the “Big History” type) comes packaged with some standard of completeness (or something else?) that is less clear to me
What I was saying, there, was that to achieve anything resembling real understanding in this other sort of way, you have to have both depth and breadth; you have to reach across domains and across contexts, and you have to understand each thing you encompass in some detail. “Completeness” isn’t quite right… but perhaps it’s close.
And so the question remains if the dimension that Benquo is pointing at with “zetetic” is meaningful, and whether the objection (that I understand as “an explanation that attempts to be zetetic but is too small is ‘insight porn’ and doesn’t actually achieve the benefits of Big History”) is central.
The problem is not with explanations which attempt to be of the first sort I describe, but are too small (although that, too, is a, problem—just not the problem). The problem is with explanations which attempt to be of the first type, but also, at the same time, attempt to be of the second type. That doesn’t work. That is what gets you insight porn.
Insofar as what Benquo is pointing at is some purported dimension of variation such that moving in one direction along that dimension gets you explanations that are both more like the ones found in The Adapted Mind, and also more like the ones found in the Dessert Bible, that dimension is not meaningful, and viewing explanations or knowledge through this lens is actively harmful.
I object in the strongest terms to characterizing this sort of explanation and this sort of knowledge as “ritual behavior”.
I’m not using ‘ritual’ as a term of abuse, here; someone pressing CTRL-C to copy some text is engaging in ‘ritual behavior.’
it almost always constitutes a greater and a deeper understanding that the sort of explanation which tries to be more broad, more “from first principles”, more interdisciplinary, etc.
It’s now clear that you’re talking about quite different dimensions of variation.
[This is just responding to points that are easy to respond to contained in the parent; my overall sense is “it might take a post to point at what’s going on here, and so I’m going to try to write that post instead of handle it here.”]
I’m not using ‘ritual’ as a term of abuse, here; someone pressing CTRL-C to copy some text is engaging in ‘ritual behavior.’
Then, I confess, I haven’t the first idea just what you mean by “ritual behavior”. Either your usage of the term is so broad as to be meaningless, or… I don’t know what. In either case, you’re diverging from common usage, and I can’t really respond to your points.
I certainly hope that you manage to write that post! When you do, I’d ask that you take some time to explain what you have in mind when you speak of “ritual behavior” (and it might be prudent to consider alternate terminology, to avoid a namespace collision).
In either case, you’re diverging from common usage, and I can’t really respond to your points.
It’s behavior by rite instead of by model; stated another way, “behavior motivated by past experience” but that doesn’t quite cleave things at the joints. In particular, it’s not exclusive with “behavior motivated by models”—perhaps a better reference is something like “autopilot,” but the dominant feature of autopilot is lack of attention, which is only weakly related.
An example that comes to mind is when I tried to switch keyboard layouts, I discovered that I had two modes of typing—the unconscious knowledge of where all the qwerty keys were, that I could access effortlessly without even having a physical keyboard, and the conscious knowledge of where all the qgmlwy keys were, which I could access only through deliberate thought and careful muscular control. Even though I ‘knew’ which keyboard layout I was using, and ‘knew’ where every key was now, I also ‘knew’ that if I wanted to type an ‘a’ I used the left pinky instead of the right index finger. (After a few weeks of typing at 7 wpm, I gave up and stuck with qwerty.)
The relevance here is that what Benquo calls ‘functional’ explanation (“how they ought to interface with it right now”) is basically targeted at creating the right behavior without any judgment or interest in the resulting mental changes. It doesn’t matter to me how the person who wants to copy and paste text thinks about it; it just matters to me that they press the right keys to accomplish the goal.
I’m sorry to say that this explanation makes very little sense to me. I don’t know if there’s inferential distance here, or true disagreements about the world, or what. I think that this is another point which might benefit from a post-length discussion!
some explanations are trying to talk about underlying generators while other explanations are trying to talk about ritual behavior
I think I have some idea of what he was trying to say here, so let me try to interpret a bit (Vaniver, feel free to correct if anything I say here is mistaken).
There are two kinds of explanation (there are obviously more than two, but among them are these):
The first kind is the kind where you’re trying to tell someone how to do something. This is the kind of explanation you see on WikiHow and similar explanation sites, in how-to videos on YouTube, etc. In the current case, this would be something like the following
How to make a sourdough starter:
Step 1: Add some flour to some water
Step 2: Leave out for a few days, adding more water and flour as necessary
Step 3: And there you have a sourdough starter.
This is the kind of explanation Vaniver was referring to as “merely trying to present people with additional rituals to perform.” I think a better way to describe it is that you’re providing someone with a procedure for how to do something. [Vaniver, I’m somewhat puzzled as to why you used the word “ritual” rather than “procedure,” when “procedure” seems like the word that fits best? Is there some subtle way in which it differs from what you were trying to say?]. I’ll call it a “procedural explanation.”
The second kind may[1] also include telling someone a procedure for how to do something (note that Benquo’s explanation did, in fact, provide a simple procedure for making a sourdough starter). But the heart of this type of explanation is that it also includes the information they would have needed in order to discover that procedure for themselves. This is what I take Benquo to be referring to when he says “zetetic explanation.” When Vaniver uses the word “generators” in the quote above (though not necessarily in other contexts—some of his usages of the word confuse me as well) I think it means something like “the background knowledge or patterns of thought that would cause someone to think the thought in question on their own.” A couple examples:
The generators of the procedure for the sourdough starter were something like:[2]
On its own, grain is hard to digest
There are microbes on it that can make it easier to digest
If you create an environment they like living in, you can attract them and then get them to do things to your dough that make it easier to digest
They like environments with flour and water
This is the kind of information that would lead you to be able to generate the above procedure for making a sourdough starter on your own.
In this comment I make the point that I, and perhaps some of the mods, believe that communication is hard and that this leads me (us?) to think that people should probably put in more effort to understand others and to be understood than might feel natural. I could just as easily say that the generator of the thought that [people should probably put in more effort to understand others and to be understood than might feel natural] is that [communication is hard], where “communication is hard” stands in for a bunch of background models, past experiences, etc.
Vaniver’s example with mashing potatoes. The “ritual” or “procedure” that his friends had was “get the potato masher, use it to mash the potatoes.” But Vaniver had some more general knowledge that enabled him to generate a new procedure when that procedure failed because its preconditions weren’t in place (i.e. there was no potato masher on hand). That general knowledge (the “generators” of the thought “use a glass,” which would have allowed his friends to generate the same thought had they considered them) was probably something like:
Potatoes are pretty tough, so you need a mashing device that is sufficiently hefty
A glass is sufficiently hefty
But what does [the potato-mashing story] have to do with the OP? It does not seem to me like your cleverly practical solution to the problem of mashing potatoes had to draw on a knowledge of the history of potato-mashing, or detailed botanical understanding of tubers and their place in the food chain, or the theoretical underpinnings of the construction of kitchen tools, etc.
The history is not necessarily the important part of the “zetetic explanation.” Vaniver’s solution didn’t have to draw on the “detailed theoretical underpinnings of the construction of kitchen tools,” but it did have to draw on something like a recognition of “the principles that make a potato masher a good tool for mashing potatoes.”
I think the important feature of the “zetetic explanation” is that it** gives the generators as well as just the object-level explanation**. It connects up the listener’s web of knowledge a bit—in addition to imparting new knowledge, it draws connections between bits of knowledge the listener already had, particularly between general, theoretical knowledge and particular, applied/practical/procedural knowledge. Note that Benquo gives Feynman’s explanation of triboluminescence as another example. This leads me to believe the key feature of zetetic explanations isn’t that they explain a procedure for how to do something plus how to generate that procedure, but that they more generally connect abstract knowledge with concrete knowledge, and that they connect up the knowledge they’re trying to impart with knowledge the listener already has (I’ve been using the word “listener” rather than “reader” because, as Benquo points out, this kind of explanation is easier to give in person, where they can be personalized to the audience
). The listener probably already knows about sugar, so when Feynman explains triboluminescence he doesn’t just explain it in an abstract way, he tells that it applies to sugar so that you can link it up with something you already know about.
On one way of using these words, you might say that a zetetic explanation doesn’t just create knowledge, it creates understanding.
As I say, communication is hard, so it’s possible that I’ve misinterpreted Benquo or Vaniver here, but this is what I took them to be saying. Hope that helped some.
[1] note that, as I mention near the end of the comment, there might be zetetic explanations of things other than procedural explanations. Not sure if Benquo intended this, but I think he did, and I think in any case that it is a correct extension of the concept. (I might be wrong though—Benquo might have intended zetetic explanations to be explanations answering the question “where did X come from?” But if that’s the case then much of my interpretation near the end of the comment is probably wrong)
[2] I actually think you’re right that Benquo’s explanation doesn’t fully give the generators here (though as Vaniver says, “half of it is, in some sense, ‘left out’”), so I don’t claim that the generators I list here are fully correct, just that it would be something like this.
There’s a lot to take in here, and I may post further replies after I’ve had a chance to re-read your comment a couple of times and give it some thought. However, for now, I do have one quick observation to make:
Vaniver’s example with mashing potatoes. The “ritual” or “procedure” that his friends had was “get the potato masher, use it to mash the potatoes.” But Vaniver had some more general knowledge that enabled him to generate a new procedure when that procedure failed because its preconditions weren’t in place (i.e. there was no potato masher on hand). That general knowledge (the “generators” of the thought “use a glass,” which would have allowed his friends to generate the same thought had they considered them) was probably something like:
Potatoes are pretty tough, so you need a mashing device that is sufficiently hefty
A glass is sufficiently hefty
This is not an accurate account of Vaniver’s example! Let’s analyze the error:
“Potatoes are pretty tough” is, of course, wrong! Before mashing potatoes, you coarsely dice and boil them; at this point, they are not tough at all, but are quite soft—soft enough to come apart in your hand, too soft to even handle without the pieces breaking apart!
Thus, “you need a mashing device that is sufficiently hefty” is also not true. Heft, in fact, has nothing whatever to do with the reason why a fork was a poor tool, and a glass was a better tool.
What does, then? It’s a matter of shape; a fork is problematic because it has much less surface area to transmit the force of your hand to the potatoes, and because the fork’s mashing surface (such as it is) is not perpendicular to its primary axis (i.e., its handle), it is very awkward to bring it to bear on the potatoes in the pot or saucepan.
A glass, on the other hand, has a nice big surface area—the bottom—and, because it’s simply a cylinder, that surface area can easily be brought to bear on the potatoes, without the pot/saucepan interfering.[1]
Do you see? You constructed an explanation which was totally wrong; and not just wrong, but wrong in a way that (a) would become apparent if you actually went out and did the activity being described, and (b) the wrongness of which is not even difficult to see by thinking about—ask yourself, “what if Vaniver’s friends had used a fork with a core of solid lead, but otherwise the same shape as a regular fork? and what if instead of a glass made of… glass, they used a glass made of a lightweight plastic? would the rank ordering of these tools’ applicability to potato-mashing thereby reverse?”
I don’t mean to come down hard on you for this; it’s an error which I don’t think there’s any good reason to expect you not to have made. But that’s my whole point. It’s very easy to deceive oneself that one has a good “generator” or a good “zetetic explanation” or a good what have you, when in reality what one has is just wrong. It’s not a big problem when the explanation is about mashing potatoes; if your explanation encounters reality and is instantly shattered, well, big deal, right? You live and you learn… but when the matter is more serious than that, relying on such “knowledge” is tremendously dangerous.
[1] Indeed, there exist potato mashers which are simply cylinders—not of glass, but of wood—with coaxial handles attached.
(The parent is a long comment and makes several points, so I’m going to answer it in several parts. This is part 1.)
I object in the strongest terms to characterizing this sort of explanation and this sort of knowledge as “ritual behavior”. In fact, not only does it constitute real understanding of the problem at hand (and the problem domain in general)—the kind of understanding that lets you accomplish real-world goals, and improvise, and predict the outcomes of processes and of actions, etc.—but it almost always constitutes a greater and a deeper understanding that the sort of explanation which tries to be more broad, more “from first principles”, more interdisciplinary, etc.
What I was saying, there, was that to achieve anything resembling real understanding in this other sort of way, you have to have both depth and breadth; you have to reach across domains and across contexts, and you have to understand each thing you encompass in some detail. “Completeness” isn’t quite right… but perhaps it’s close.
The problem is not with explanations which attempt to be of the first sort I describe, but are too small (although that, too, is a, problem—just not the problem). The problem is with explanations which attempt to be of the first type, but also, at the same time, attempt to be of the second type. That doesn’t work. That is what gets you insight porn.
Insofar as what Benquo is pointing at is some purported dimension of variation such that moving in one direction along that dimension gets you explanations that are both more like the ones found in The Adapted Mind, and also more like the ones found in the Dessert Bible, that dimension is not meaningful, and viewing explanations or knowledge through this lens is actively harmful.
I’m not using ‘ritual’ as a term of abuse, here; someone pressing CTRL-C to copy some text is engaging in ‘ritual behavior.’
It’s now clear that you’re talking about quite different dimensions of variation.
[This is just responding to points that are easy to respond to contained in the parent; my overall sense is “it might take a post to point at what’s going on here, and so I’m going to try to write that post instead of handle it here.”]
Then, I confess, I haven’t the first idea just what you mean by “ritual behavior”. Either your usage of the term is so broad as to be meaningless, or… I don’t know what. In either case, you’re diverging from common usage, and I can’t really respond to your points.
I certainly hope that you manage to write that post! When you do, I’d ask that you take some time to explain what you have in mind when you speak of “ritual behavior” (and it might be prudent to consider alternate terminology, to avoid a namespace collision).
It’s behavior by rite instead of by model; stated another way, “behavior motivated by past experience” but that doesn’t quite cleave things at the joints. In particular, it’s not exclusive with “behavior motivated by models”—perhaps a better reference is something like “autopilot,” but the dominant feature of autopilot is lack of attention, which is only weakly related.
An example that comes to mind is when I tried to switch keyboard layouts, I discovered that I had two modes of typing—the unconscious knowledge of where all the qwerty keys were, that I could access effortlessly without even having a physical keyboard, and the conscious knowledge of where all the qgmlwy keys were, which I could access only through deliberate thought and careful muscular control. Even though I ‘knew’ which keyboard layout I was using, and ‘knew’ where every key was now, I also ‘knew’ that if I wanted to type an ‘a’ I used the left pinky instead of the right index finger. (After a few weeks of typing at 7 wpm, I gave up and stuck with qwerty.)
The relevance here is that what Benquo calls ‘functional’ explanation (“how they ought to interface with it right now”) is basically targeted at creating the right behavior without any judgment or interest in the resulting mental changes. It doesn’t matter to me how the person who wants to copy and paste text thinks about it; it just matters to me that they press the right keys to accomplish the goal.
I’m sorry to say that this explanation makes very little sense to me. I don’t know if there’s inferential distance here, or true disagreements about the world, or what. I think that this is another point which might benefit from a post-length discussion!
There’s a lot going on in this thread, so I’m not sure exactly where this response best belongs, so I’ll just put it here.
In this comment Vaniver wrote:
I think I have some idea of what he was trying to say here, so let me try to interpret a bit (Vaniver, feel free to correct if anything I say here is mistaken).
There are two kinds of explanation (there are obviously more than two, but among them are these):
The first kind is the kind where you’re trying to tell someone how to do something. This is the kind of explanation you see on WikiHow and similar explanation sites, in how-to videos on YouTube, etc. In the current case, this would be something like the following
This is the kind of explanation Vaniver was referring to as “merely trying to present people with additional rituals to perform.” I think a better way to describe it is that you’re providing someone with a procedure for how to do something. [Vaniver, I’m somewhat puzzled as to why you used the word “ritual” rather than “procedure,” when “procedure” seems like the word that fits best? Is there some subtle way in which it differs from what you were trying to say?]. I’ll call it a “procedural explanation.”
The second kind may[1] also include telling someone a procedure for how to do something (note that Benquo’s explanation did, in fact, provide a simple procedure for making a sourdough starter). But the heart of this type of explanation is that it also includes the information they would have needed in order to discover that procedure for themselves. This is what I take Benquo to be referring to when he says “zetetic explanation.” When Vaniver uses the word “generators” in the quote above (though not necessarily in other contexts—some of his usages of the word confuse me as well) I think it means something like “the background knowledge or patterns of thought that would cause someone to think the thought in question on their own.” A couple examples:
The generators of the procedure for the sourdough starter were something like:[2]
On its own, grain is hard to digest
There are microbes on it that can make it easier to digest
If you create an environment they like living in, you can attract them and then get them to do things to your dough that make it easier to digest
They like environments with flour and water This is the kind of information that would lead you to be able to generate the above procedure for making a sourdough starter on your own.
In this comment I make the point that I, and perhaps some of the mods, believe that communication is hard and that this leads me (us?) to think that people should probably put in more effort to understand others and to be understood than might feel natural. I could just as easily say that the generator of the thought that [people should probably put in more effort to understand others and to be understood than might feel natural] is that [communication is hard], where “communication is hard” stands in for a bunch of background models, past experiences, etc.
Vaniver’s example with mashing potatoes. The “ritual” or “procedure” that his friends had was “get the potato masher, use it to mash the potatoes.” But Vaniver had some more general knowledge that enabled him to generate a new procedure when that procedure failed because its preconditions weren’t in place (i.e. there was no potato masher on hand). That general knowledge (the “generators” of the thought “use a glass,” which would have allowed his friends to generate the same thought had they considered them) was probably something like:
Potatoes are pretty tough, so you need a mashing device that is sufficiently hefty
A glass is sufficiently hefty
The history is not necessarily the important part of the “zetetic explanation.” Vaniver’s solution didn’t have to draw on the “detailed theoretical underpinnings of the construction of kitchen tools,” but it did have to draw on something like a recognition of “the principles that make a potato masher a good tool for mashing potatoes.”
I think the important feature of the “zetetic explanation” is that it** gives the generators as well as just the object-level explanation**. It connects up the listener’s web of knowledge a bit—in addition to imparting new knowledge, it draws connections between bits of knowledge the listener already had, particularly between general, theoretical knowledge and particular, applied/practical/procedural knowledge. Note that Benquo gives Feynman’s explanation of triboluminescence as another example. This leads me to believe the key feature of zetetic explanations isn’t that they explain a procedure for how to do something plus how to generate that procedure, but that they more generally connect abstract knowledge with concrete knowledge, and that they connect up the knowledge they’re trying to impart with knowledge the listener already has (I’ve been using the word “listener” rather than “reader” because, as Benquo points out, this kind of explanation is easier to give in person, where they can be personalized to the audience ). The listener probably already knows about sugar, so when Feynman explains triboluminescence he doesn’t just explain it in an abstract way, he tells that it applies to sugar so that you can link it up with something you already know about.
On one way of using these words, you might say that a zetetic explanation doesn’t just create knowledge, it creates understanding.
As I say, communication is hard, so it’s possible that I’ve misinterpreted Benquo or Vaniver here, but this is what I took them to be saying. Hope that helped some.
[1] note that, as I mention near the end of the comment, there might be zetetic explanations of things other than procedural explanations. Not sure if Benquo intended this, but I think he did, and I think in any case that it is a correct extension of the concept. (I might be wrong though—Benquo might have intended zetetic explanations to be explanations answering the question “where did X come from?” But if that’s the case then much of my interpretation near the end of the comment is probably wrong)
[2] I actually think you’re right that Benquo’s explanation doesn’t fully give the generators here (though as Vaniver says, “half of it is, in some sense, ‘left out’”), so I don’t claim that the generators I list here are fully correct, just that it would be something like this.
There’s a lot to take in here, and I may post further replies after I’ve had a chance to re-read your comment a couple of times and give it some thought. However, for now, I do have one quick observation to make:
This is not an accurate account of Vaniver’s example! Let’s analyze the error:
“Potatoes are pretty tough” is, of course, wrong! Before mashing potatoes, you coarsely dice and boil them; at this point, they are not tough at all, but are quite soft—soft enough to come apart in your hand, too soft to even handle without the pieces breaking apart!
Thus, “you need a mashing device that is sufficiently hefty” is also not true. Heft, in fact, has nothing whatever to do with the reason why a fork was a poor tool, and a glass was a better tool.
What does, then? It’s a matter of shape; a fork is problematic because it has much less surface area to transmit the force of your hand to the potatoes, and because the fork’s mashing surface (such as it is) is not perpendicular to its primary axis (i.e., its handle), it is very awkward to bring it to bear on the potatoes in the pot or saucepan.
A glass, on the other hand, has a nice big surface area—the bottom—and, because it’s simply a cylinder, that surface area can easily be brought to bear on the potatoes, without the pot/saucepan interfering.[1]
Do you see? You constructed an explanation which was totally wrong; and not just wrong, but wrong in a way that (a) would become apparent if you actually went out and did the activity being described, and (b) the wrongness of which is not even difficult to see by thinking about—ask yourself, “what if Vaniver’s friends had used a fork with a core of solid lead, but otherwise the same shape as a regular fork? and what if instead of a glass made of… glass, they used a glass made of a lightweight plastic? would the rank ordering of these tools’ applicability to potato-mashing thereby reverse?”
I don’t mean to come down hard on you for this; it’s an error which I don’t think there’s any good reason to expect you not to have made. But that’s my whole point. It’s very easy to deceive oneself that one has a good “generator” or a good “zetetic explanation” or a good what have you, when in reality what one has is just wrong. It’s not a big problem when the explanation is about mashing potatoes; if your explanation encounters reality and is instantly shattered, well, big deal, right? You live and you learn… but when the matter is more serious than that, relying on such “knowledge” is tremendously dangerous.
[1] Indeed, there exist potato mashers which are simply cylinders—not of glass, but of wood—with coaxial handles attached.