I assumed you meant what you wrote. It does not seem mysterious or confusing, just contradictory. (If you meant something other than what you wrote, well, I guess you’ll want to clarify.)
In case my point was obscure—time travel stories aren’t real, and Robinson Crusoe is also fictional. The sorts of skills that fictional characters use in stories like this, bear, for the most part, little resemblance to the sorts of skills that ordinary, real people use to navigate their ordinary, real lives.
Your yeast example is an excellent example of basically this very point.
Time travel and Robinson Crusoe stories (and zombie apocalypse stories etc) tend to make the assumption that if you “know about” X you can reinvent it from scratch. This implies a standard of knowledge such that you are competent to interact with the thing, and with its precursors, or at least have an idea of how you’d learn to do so. What my mother had learned about yeast in school was completely inadequate for that, but my explanation here is adequate. Learning what yeast is by learning things like its cell structure, scientific name, etc, doesn’t give you a critical piece of information about how it exists in the physical world you navigate—that it’s *already on the flour*.
What my mother had learned about yeast in school was completely inadequate for that, but my explanation here is adequate.
No. Your explanation here is definitely, definitely not adequate.
And the reason you are able to deceive yourself about this, is that—again—such “ reinvent it from scratch” scenarios are totally fictional. You haven’t actually had to reinvent the yeast that we buy in a supermarket from scratch. Like the time travel story and like Robinson Crusoe, all you’ve had to optimize your explanation for is “this makes for fun reading”, not “this actually works”.
No. Your explanation here is definitely, definitely not adequate.
On the object level, I read Benquo’s “that” as referring to “make sourdough starter using flour and the wild yeast already present in the flour,” which in fact this post is sufficient for (because it points out that you can just leave out the dough and it will attain sourdough-nature).
The post isn’t called “yeast,” though, it’s called “zetetic explanation,” and is about how explanations try to hook into ontologies. The variation that it’s trying to point out—that some explanations are trying to talk about underlying generators while other explanations are trying to talk about ritual behavior—seems real, though of course explanations in the wild will cover many such levels.
What’s not clear to me is… whether you see the dimension that Benquo is trying to point at, and what specifically you’re trying to fault him for? Like, yes, obviously this post does not contain every fact about yeast. As mentioned in the post:
Of course, it can be hard to know where to stop in such explanations, and it can also be hard to know where to start. This post could easily have been twice as long.
Which implies that at least half of it, in some sense, is ‘left out.’ But is Benquo’s explanation trying to hook into people’s generators, such that their map of the world has more counterfactual potency than it did before, or is it merely trying to present people with additional rituals they can perform?
The reason that Robinson Crusoe is brought up is not that time travel stories are ‘real’ or part of ‘the ordinary means by which people navigate their lives.’ It’s because there’s variance in ‘the ordinary means by which people navigate their lives,’ with some relying heavily on generators and others relying heavily on rituals, and time travel stories expose the difference, as the person who relies on ritual loses their ritual whereas the person who relies on generators does not lose their generators. A while ago, some housemates were attempting to mash potatoes, but didn’t have a potato masher (as had existed in their childhood kitchen), and were despairing at doing so with a fork. “Use a glass,” I said, demonstrating once. This wasn’t a potato-mashing ritual I had inherited from someone else, but querying my tool generators to find something in the kitchen that was better at mashing that volume of potatoes than a fork. And they seemed somewhat impressed that I could immediately handle their problem and embarrassed that they hadn’t, especially because of how clearly it connected to the dimension that Benquo is gesturing towards here.
What’s not clear to me is… whether you see the dimension that Benquo is trying to point at, and what specifically you’re trying to fault him for?
I answered this question at some length in this comment.
is Benquo’s explanation trying to hook into people’s generators, such that their world has more counterfactual potency than it did before
I confess that this terminology (hooking into generators, counterfactual potency) is unfamiliar to me, so I can’t really answer this. Is there some place where these terms/concepts are explained?
there’s variance in ‘the ordinary means by which people navigate their lives,’ with some relying heavily on generators and others relying heavily on rituals, and time travel stories expose the difference, as the person who relies on ritual loses their ritual whereas the person who relies on generators does not lose their generators
But this isn’t right, is it? Rather, the author of the story describes the person who “relies on ritual” as losing their ritual, and the author of the story describes the person who “relies on on generators” as not losing their generators.
In other words: the quoted part of your comment (and similar sentiments) only make sense as an instance of “generalizing from fictional evidence”.
What does it tell us about reality, that people in time-travel stories who behave in certain ways, get certain results? Not much, I’d say, except that science-fiction authors imagine certain hypothetical scenarios in a certain way, or that readers prefer to read certain sorts of stories, etc.
A while ago, some housemates were attempting to mash potatoes, but didn’t have a potato masher (as had existed in their childhood kitchen), and were despairing at doing so with a fork. “Use a glass,” I said
Indeed, or a whisk, or a wooden spoon, or a hand mixer. I’ve had a number of similar experiences, myself (for example, I once improvised a double boiler with a sauté pan, a saucepan, and a length of string).
But what does this 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.
I answered this question at some length in this comment.
I had read that comment before I wrote the grandparent, and it still wasn’t clear to me.
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, 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. 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.
[That is, it may well be that while walls are useful, individual bricks are not, and so a strategy of accumulating bricks is useless without also having some focus on architecture, and so it is not particularly useful to highlight the skill of brick-accumulation. I hope it is also clear how the original comment in this chain is not a good pointer towards this presentation of a way in which Benquo’s post could be deeply mistaken.]
But this isn’t right, is it?
I apologize if this response seems overly basic, because I’m genuinely uncertain where the miscommunication is happening here, and so am attempting to cover lots of possibilities.
One hypothesis that seems too simplistic to be right is something like “Said is generally skeptical of counterfactual reasoning.” That is, suppose I perform some behavior (like mashing potatoes with a glass), and we then discuss what would have happened if instead I performed a different behavior (like mashing potatoes with a whisk). Perhaps we have to move from language like “true” and “false” to language like “consistent” and “inconsistent,” but it seems to me that there’s value in considering statements like “If I had tried to mash potatoes with the whisk in my kitchen, it wouldn’t have worked any better than the fork” and value in statements like “that would have been so because the whisk’s tines are thin and easily deformed, enough so that they would be overpowered by the potatoes.”
Now, those are statements about models; we have to modify them to get predictions about reality. For the first one, I have to cash it out in terms of subjective experience during a future test; for the second one, the connection is even less direct, because it’s not just about a future experimental result but what changes to the experimental setup would produce different results. In addition, because they’re statements about models, they have a truth-value of sorts that’s different from the experimental results (the statement ‘Vaniver believes X’ can well be true even if X is itself false, and the statement ‘X is consistent with Y’ can again be true even if X is itself false).
The thing that the time-travel story is doing is not delivering experimental results, because we can’t actually send a scientist and a ritualist back in time and determine what consequences would result. The thing that time-travel stories are doing is proposing experiments that are impossible in reality but accessible with models.
That is, suppose I say “Comparing two people transported from our modern culture to culture A, I think a scientist would be better at surviving than someone who has less understanding of how modern culture is put together or the individual work of understanding and creating culture.” It seems to me like you have many responses, ranging from “I agree, because X” to “I disagree, because Y” to “I don’t think this question is resolvable” to “I don’t think this question is interesting.” It seems to me like there’s interesting material in the first two responses, even if the third response is in fact valid.
A potentially absurd example: it seems to me like there’s a consistent view in which the mathematical technique of proof by contradiction is classed with “generalizing from fictional evidence.” Suppose I am trying to convince Alice that the square root of 2 is a irrational number; I start by saying “suppose it is rational,” step through the argument, and then derive a contradiction. “Therefore,” I conclude, “it is irrational.” Alice replies with “wait, but this conclusion depends on an argument whose premise is false; it seems exceedingly dangerous to allow [arguments whose premises are false] as valid operations in your logic.” How do I convince Alice that proof by contradiction is valid in a way that generalization from fictional evidence is not?
[Once I have such an argument, which perhaps rests on a distinction between various kinds of fictional evidence or a crisper definition of ‘fictional,’ can I generalize that argument to this scenario, not necessarily to rescue time travel stories specifically, but to rescue something adjacent to time travel stories?]
But what does this 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.
It has to do with the distinction between generators of ritual and rituals, or the invention of tools and the use of tools. The central claims of the OP (as I understand it) are:
1. There is a distinction between using tools and inventing them.
2. This distinction is reflected in explanations, as explanations vary in how much they improve the use of tools and how much they improve the invention of tools.
3. The structure and content of an explanation is linked to how that explanation varies on those dimensions, and that there is a style of explanation that focuses on whys and connections that results in more improvement along the dimension of invention of tools.
4. Many explanations are solely judged on how well they improve tool use in a narrow dimension (because, perhaps, this is the only thing that can be verifiably tested) and one should expect this to lead to explanations that are deficient at improving tool invention.
5. It is desirable to have the ability to invent tools as well as just use them.
[I expect this presentation to be slightly unsatisfying to Benquo, because explanations aren’t just about using them; and so ‘tools’ are a bit too narrow, but are perhaps easier to see than the real thing.]
That example only engages with some of the points; it’s a demonstration of 1 and 5 more than it is 2, 3, or 4. (It’s implicitly an example of 4 in that this is clearly a one-off test; if we want to measure my ability to invent tools, we can’t really ask me to mash potatoes three times in a row, or verify that techniques I generate are original instead of copied.) It also seems important that, in worldview of the OP, my action is not simply “clever” but has a more detailed description of what mental operations led to the new behavior, such that it could perhaps be transferred.
I agree that there’s some real controversy or discernment involved with 3; a detailed botanical understanding of tubers seems unlikely to help, unless it did something squishy like cement a self-narrative as a tool inventor such that my mind even bothered to spend calories looking for a better way to mash potatoes, or it’s the case that a policy of seeking out a connected understanding of the world led to both knowing the botanical understanding of tubers and the ability to improvise a potato masher. And it seems easy to look at botanical understandings of tubers and see some of them as more or less connected to the navigation of lives (and thus likely more or less useful for the invention of tools related to tubers).
I basically agree with your summary of my central claims, and think your treatment of the subject deserves at least a separate comment and ideally a separate post. One thing that’s more obvious to me reading your comment is the extent to which my post is a praise of episteme done right over metis (including metis about pretending episteme).
Thanks for the interpretive labor you’re doing, by the way—I’m constrained by the fact that I’ll naturally feel defensive when someone’s somewhat rudely telling me that I’m talking nonsense, so it’s helpful for you to step in as a third party & try to bridge the gap here.
(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 3.)
The central claims of the OP (as I understand it) are:
So, first all, it’s not clear to me that this is a good summary of the OP (in the sense that—it seems to me—it adds your interpretation to it, rather than representing the post directly). That being said, I’m not Benquo, so perhaps this is indeed what he meant. But regardless of any of that, let me go ahead and respond to these claims point by point:
There is a distinction between using tools and inventing them.
This is rather vague. A distinction? What is the nature of this distinction, exactly? I mean, this claim seems trivially true, in some sense, but I’m not sure how important it’s supposed to be, or how fundamental, etc. Elaborations (with details and examples) would help.
This distinction is reflected in explanations, as explanations vary in how much they improve the use of tools and how much they improve the invention of tools.
So, first of all, it seems to me like either there’s an implication that all human activity can be placed into one of these two categories (“using tools” vs. “inventing tools”). Or perhaps it’s only all human activity of some specific type? If so, what type would that be?
Or, otherwise, the question arises: do some explanations do things other than “improve the use of tools” or “improve the invention of tools”—either instead of, or in addition to? What other things might those be?
Also, is there any correlation between how much any given explanation improves the use of tools vs. how much it improves the invention of tools? Or is this a linear spectrum? Or are these totally orthogonal dimensions? And if there is a correlation, what is its causal origin? (And are these categories even sensible?)
And another question: how does the domain-specificity of an explanation interact with the degree to which “does this improve the use of tools” and “does this improve the invention of tools” even make sense as questions to ask?
The structure and content of an explanation is linked to how that explanation varies on those dimensions, and that there is a style of explanation that focuses on whys and connections that results in more improvement along the dimension of invention of tools.
This seems much too vague a claim for me to say anything more about it than what I’ve said above, re: #2.
Many explanations are solely judged on how well they improve tool use in a narrow dimension (because, perhaps, this is the only thing that can be verifiably tested) and one should expect this to lead to explanations that are deficient at improving tool invention.
There are actually several claims in here, which must be untangled before they can be addressed. My questions re: #2 seem like reasonable first steps toward untangling this question also.
It is desirable to have the ability to invent tools as well as just use them.
This is difficult to evaluate. Negate it, and we have:
“It is undesirable to have the ability to invent tools; we should only be able to use tools, not invent them.”
I have trouble imagining who would ever endorse this claim, so #5 is either an applause light… or, it’s an oblique way of suggesting that we should move further in some direction, on some purported spectrum.
Taken that way, we might interpret it as saying that we (for some value of “we”) currently have insufficient ability to invent tools, and should have more. In which case, it seems necessary to make, and defend, an explicit, positive claim about where on this purported spectrum we currently are, as well as a normative claim about where we ought to be. (The prerequisite for all of this, of course, would be establishing the structure of the purported spectrum in the first place, as I comment on above.)
That example [with the potatoes —SA] only engages with some of the points; it’s a demonstration of 1 and 5 more than it is 2, 3, or 4.
It is not a coincidence that #1 and #5 are, as I say above, the least interesting and most trivial of the claims (at least when taken at face value).
As an aside—though this is not (I think) terribly relevant to the OP—it does not seem to me like the “using tools vs. inventing tools” dichotomy (of which I am still rather skeptical) is all that natural a fit for characterizing your example with the potato mashing. (After all, you didn’t actually invent a new tool!) One could also describe it in some sort of “outside-the-box thinking” terms, or perhaps in terms of some sort of “analytical skills”[1], or perhaps in terms of “seeing the artificiality of purposes”[2], etc. We could have endless fun with the game of inventing plausible paradigms with which to describe this bit of clever thinking on your part… but I do not think the exercise would gain us any useful understanding.
[1] In a fairly literal sense of the word: we might say, perhaps, the you analyzed the act of using a potato masher to mash potatoes—that is, you decomposed the act into its constituent parts, such as “exerting pressure on the potatoes to crush them and deform their structure, breaking them up” and “using an instrument shaped so as to allow downward pressure to be exerted over a wide area”, etc.; and that this analysis, this skill of breaking-down, is what allowed you to synthesize your clever solution.
[2] Namely, of course, the fact that “the glass is for drinking out of” is not a property of the glass, and that the glass simply is the specific physical object that it is; it has no little XML tag attached, where its purpose is stored. We might, perhaps, claim that a keen sense of the artificiality of purpose is what allows one to perceive the possibility of unorthodox uses for designed artifacts.
So, first of all, it seems to me like either there’s an implication that all human activity can be placed into one of these two categories (“using tools” vs. “inventing tools”). Or perhaps it’s only all human activity of some specific type? If so, what type would that be?
I meant the latter, and the answer is going to be unsatisfying: the type is “using or inventing tools.” Specifically, note that “inventing” is a subcategory of “using,” worth separating out because it uses cognitively distinct labor (like the sort you refer to as ‘analyzing’). Then the questions are “okay, what fuels that cognitively distinct labor? What explanations make people better at analyzing?”.
This also seems related to all of the other questions you raise in this subsection, where it seems like you’re trying to expand the claim (consider the difference between “A and B are different” and “are you implying that everything is A or B?”, and consider the difference between “there are two dimensions” and “what are the statistical properties of the real world along those dimensions?”). I am sort of torn on this (as conversational technique), because it seems useful at exploring the thing, but also changes the direction of the conversation in a way that increases feelings of friction, or something.
In particular, I have only vague opinions on the statistical properties of explanations in the wild, and so the question puts me in something of a bind where either I share my vague opinions (which, if they get expanded, means I am even further aground, and if they get contradicted, the general point may be lost in the controversy) or somehow dismiss the question (which has its own share of drawbacks), and this bind is an example of the sort of friction this sort of thing can generate.
In which case, it seems necessary to make, and defend, an explicit, positive claim about where on this purported spectrum we currently are, as well as a normative claim about where we ought to be.
In the OP, the examples of this are Benquo’s mother and Benquo, in the context of yeast. In general, I don’t think I agree that such claims need to be explicit, and it’s not obvious to me that you have the right standards for ‘defend.’
I expect to be able to broadcast advice on how to lose weight and trust that readers have their own sense of their weight and their own sense of their desired weight and their own sense of their other tradeoffs, such that they judge my advice accordingly, rather than requiring that any advice on how to lose weight come packaged with disclaimers about anorexia and a discourse on what sort of measurements are actually connected to anything good. Those things should exist somewhere, of course—the culture should have ‘anorexia’ as a concept and discuss it sometimes, and should have concepts for things like bodyfat percentage—but requiring not just that they exist everywhere but also that anyone who touches on any part of the topic be an expert on the whole topic dramatically limits what can be said.
Connecting back: the discussion of leavening here reads to me as something like “don’t pretend that you know what leavening is in my presence, you ignoramus!”, which is a move that is occasionally sensible to make (if, say, Benquo claimed to know more about yeast than Said does, a battle of facts to settle the matter seems appropriate) but seems out of place here. [The reasons why it seems out of place here touch on controversies that are long to get into. I am not making a generic “this chills speech and that’s bad” argument as some speech should be chilled; I am instead making a claim of the form “this way to divide chilled and unchilled speech doesn’t line up with the broader goals of advancing the art of human rationality.”]
[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 don’t really follow most of what you say here about types of explanations, conversation directions, and feelings of friction, so I won’t respond to that part. Perhaps the post you mean to write will clarify things.
Concerning this bit specifically:
… requiring not just that they exist everywhere but also that anyone who touches on any part of the topic be an expert on the whole topic dramatically limits what can be said.
I think it’s often good to dramatically limit what can be said. I think that there are many cases where most of what can be said—in the absence of such limits—is nonsense; and we should try our outmost to ensure that nonsense cannot be said, and only not-nonsense can be said.
Connecting back: the function of the discussion of leavening here, reads to me as something like “don’t pretend that you know what leavening is in my presence, you ignoramus!“, which is a move that is occasionally sensible to make (if, say, Benquo claimed to know more about yeast than Said does, a battle of facts to settle the matter seems appropriate) but seems out of place here.
If, indeed, it is the case that Benquo doesn’t know what leavening is, then this is an excellent reason to distrust what he says in the OP. In that hypothetical case (as, absent a reply from Benquo, we still do not know whether it is the case in reality), the fact that it was in my presence that he pretended to that specific knowledge which he does not possess is fortuitous, as it allowed that lack of knowledge to be pointed out, and thus gave all readers the opportunity to reduce their credence in the OP’s claims. (One of the reasons why I so vehemently oppose insight-porn type posts is due to the Dan Brown phenomenon, especially combined with the “Gell-mann amnesia” effect: something can sound very much like real knowledge/expertise, but without an actual expert on hand to verify it, how do we know it isn’t just a pile of nonsense? We don’t, of course. See also Scott’s old post about epistemic learned helplessness, which talks about how explanations can be very convincing while being total nonsense.)
[The reasons why it seems out of place here touch on controversies that are long to get into. I am not making a generic “this chills speech and that’s bad” argument as some speech should be chilled; I am instead making a claim of the form “this way to divide chilled and unchilled speech doesn’t line up with the broader goals of rationality.“]
Well, as you say: some speech should be chilled. But I look forward to your more detailed commentary on this matter.
I appreciate the writing and clarity, but also (as we’ve gone over in a few past discussions) disagree on the object level. I ended up downvoting this comment because I think the position it defends is potentially quite damaging on a norms level, but wanted to make it clear that I do not disagree with the phrasing, method of communication, or fact that this comment was written.
(Of course, this highlights problems with karma serving multiple purposes that are sometimes at odds, which I am aware of and would still like to fix, but for now we have what we have)
(The parent is a long comment and makes several points, so I’m going to answer it in several parts. This is part 2.)
I hope it is also clear how the original comment in this chain is not a good pointer towards this presentation of a way in which Benquo’s post could be deeply mistaken.
The point implied by the original comment in this chain is absolutely critical. It disappoints me to see it (mostly) dismissed, because I think it is emblematic of a deep and pervasive problem with current trends in “rationalist” thought. (I elaborate somewhat further in this comment.)
One hypothesis that seems too simplistic to be right is something like “Said is generally skeptical of counterfactual reasoning.”
In a sense, this is, indeed, accurate. I do not mean to recapitulate, here, in this comment thread, the entirety of the philosophical debates about counterfactuals, but my view (which to me to be relatively uncontroversial) is this:
… suppose I perform some behavior (like mashing potatoes with a glass), and we then discuss what would have happened if instead I performed a different behavior (like mashing potatoes with a whisk).
It seems to me that we can have a meaningful discussion about this counterfactual scenario to the extent that we can transform it into questions like:
“What has happened in the past, in situations where I have mashed potatoes with a whisk?”
“What has happened in the past, in situations similar to the above—for example, cases where I have mashed turnips with a whisk, or mashed potatoes with a fork?”
“What do I predict will happen in the future, if I do any of the above things?”
#1 and #2 concern mundane facts, which are known to us. (We can also modify them along the lines of “not I, but my friend Ann, mashed potatoes with a whisk”, or “I heard from my mother about someone who mashed potatoes with a whisk”, etc.) #3 concerns predictions, which become informative once made and then tested.
In the “time-travel story case”, #1 doesn’t apply for obvious reasons; #2 doesn’t apply unless you relax the standard of similarity so far that it becomes useless; #3 also doesn’t apply because—at least for the foreseeable future—we can’t do this experiment. So any discussion about “what would happen” in this imaginary scenario is nonsense; nothing we can say about “what would happen” can be true, or false, in any meaningful way.
It seems to me like you have many responses, ranging from “I agree, because X” to “I disagree, because Y” to “I don’t think this question is resolvable” to “I don’t think this question is interesting.” It seems to me like there’s interesting material in the first two responses, even if the third response is in fact valid.
The question is unresolvable and uninteresting; I don’t see what there is to agree or disagree about.
A potentially absurd example: it seems to me like there’s a consistent view in which the mathematical technique of proof by contradiction is classed with “generalizing from fictional evidence.”
I agree that this is absurd. What you’re talking about here is formal systems; that is a very different case. (I originally typed out an extensive rebuttal of your example, but to be honest, it seems to me like it’s simply a non sequitur, which makes the rebuttal moot.)
The point implied by the original comment in this chain is absolutely critical.
There are two tracks here:
1) If the point is critical, implying it is perhaps not sufficient, and the thing should be spelled out. Short comments often imply many distinct generators.
In particular, the generator that I think is most obvious is “there’s a genre mismatch between ‘the ordinary means by which people navigate their lives’ and ‘time-travel stories’, as the first is nonfictional and the second is fictional; don’t generalize from fictional evidence!”, but the position that I saw as a more serious objection from Benquo’s point of view was “while there are powerful models here, there’s also insight porn that feels powerful but isn’t; it is not clear that the dimension you highlight separates the two as opposed to leading you towards insight porn.”
2) Whether or not the point is correct. As it happens, I think the second concern (that this doesn’t reliably distinguish insight porn from true insight) is interesting and important, and that the first concern (that time travel stories are completely distinct from ordinary lives) is mistaken.
A brief comment on why it’s mistaken: Robinson Crusoe is a fictional example, yes, but it’s a fictional member of a real class, and in explanatory pieces you should expect the author to use examples the audience will know, and those will generally be fictional examples because of both higher audience recognition and fictional examples can more crisply separate out the real thing. The ordinary means by which people navigate their lives includes losing some foundations of support, venturing into the unknown, and making tools out of their constituent parts; there is a meaningful way in which any programmer who opens up a new text window is doing something cognitively similar to Robinson Crusoe.
[A frame people can adopt, which is sometimes useful, is that they’re an amnesiac time traveler from 3018; what thing can they do now, even though they don’t remember what it is? See Archimedes Chronophone: the point here is a subtle one that’s not “remember something from the future” because you’ve forgotten it, it’s “what happens if I take seriously the possibility that there are major opportunities that are accessible to someone now just because they know something, and what modes of thought might lead to discovering that thing?”.]
[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.”]
This is as good a time as any for me to mention that this term “generators”, which you’ve used a few times now, is not familiar to me in this context. I think I can sort of guess the general meaning from context, but I’m really not sure. Where is it from? Is it idiosyncratic to you, or…?
Anyhow, as to your #1, both objections you describe are important. Yes, don’t generalize from fictional evidence, and also avoid insight porn.
Robinson Crusoe is a fictional example, yes, but it’s a fictional member of a real class …
What class? People who’ve gotten shipwrecked? Or people who’ve gotten shipwrecked and managed to sustain themselves via their resourcefulness, etc.? Or something else?
If an author chooses to use a fictional example, then the specific real class of which the fictional example is a member should be identified explicitly, and as many examples as possible of real members of that class should be provided.
… and in explanatory pieces you should expect the author to use examples the audience will know, and those will generally be fictional examples because of both higher audience recognition and fictional examples can more crisply separate out the real thing.
I do not at all agree that this is a reasonable expectation. In fact, I think that reliance on fictional examples is a deep and pervasive problem in “rationalist” writing (and thought), and one which has done much to corrupt the epistemics of the rationalist community/movement. I can hardly think of terms too strong in which to object to this practice. I think it would be a very good idea to excise it, root and stem. (Perhaps, one day, we may trust ourselves with the use of fictional examples once more; but not now, and not for some time.)
The ordinary means by which people navigate their lives includes losing some foundations of support, venturing into the unknown, and making tools out of their constituent parts; there is a meaningful way in which any programmer who opens up a new text window is doing something cognitively similar to Robinson Crusoe.
I’m sorry, but I think that this is an absurd analogy. This is “in some sense…” type reasoning taken much, much too far.
(As for the bit about the chronophone, well… I don’t think it’s critical to your points, so I won’t take up more space and time with my views on it. But if you think it’s a critical point, then I’ll respond to that, as I certainly do have opinions on it.)
I agree time travel is nothing which applies to #1,#2 or #3. However Im curious:
Are time travel stories not taking points #1 and #2 in order to create a szenario to explore #3? Meaning I create a situation and in order to make it explorable and detatch it from people’s expectations I use the literary device of time travel.
I think I can explain this better than it’s currently been explained, but also it doesn’t feel like you’re engaging with the OP’s goals or thesis, and would want to see more effort from you to understand it before engaging further.
(I think in this thread you’ve raised some interesting points about what sort of things are worth learning and teaching, but they were mostly unrelated to Benquo’s point)
As I say in the latter part of this comment, it seems to me that Benquo’s thesis is fundamentally confused/misguided, in that it attempts to conflate two things which it not only does not make sense to conflate, but is a bad idea to try and do so.
Perhaps you disagree, or think that I’ve misunderstood. Fair enough. But it is strange to say that I haven’t engaged. The linked comment is absolutely the heart of my counterpoint. Almost no one (certainly not Benquo himself) responded to what I said there, or said anything at all relevant, with the exception of Vaniver (whose comment I did not entirely understand, due—apparently?—to terminological issues, but to which I did respond, as you see).
Again, if you think I’ve misunderstood or you disagree with my view, then please do say why; but the claim that I simply haven’t engaged with the OP’s points strikes me as unsupportable.
I’d like to understand why you think the explanation of yeast is inadequate and why, in your opinion, the adequacy of the explanaiton of yeast is of importance to the topic of the article, namely the exploration and typification of a certain style of explaining things.
Said did specify that it’s inadequate for the isolation of supermarket yeast. I agree, but think that this is beside the point; I was trying to give an adequate description of yeast’s role in making bread, not its role specifically in modern industrialized breadmaking.
First of all, bread-making need not be “industrialized” in order to—for all practical purposes—require commercially-produced yeast. If you doubt this, then please provide “from-scratch” (i.e., without using store-bought yeast) recipes of all of the following (results must be indistinguishable from those produced with store-bought yeast):
Challah
“Black bread” (wheat+rye breads such as Darnitsky or Orlovsky)
Brioche
Pizza dough
Second, if you want to explain yeast’s role in making bread, it is not enough to comment that yeast gives off CO2 and thereby leavens the dough. You have to answer the following questions (can you do this without consulting Wikipedia?):
Why should dough be leavened? You say this makes it “nicer” to eat, but how?
Is yeast the only way to leaven dough? What are the two other common leavening methods?
Why are the other leavening methods inappropriate for bread? (Or are they?)
In other words, for an answer to be fully satisfying, to impart the kind of understanding that lets us make predictions, then it needs to not only answer the question of “why X?”, but also “why X and not Y or Z?” (In this case: “why yeast, and not any of the alternatives?”)
Finally, you say:
Zetetic explanations are empowering. First, the integration of concrete and model-based thinking is checkable on multiple levels—you can look up confirming or disconfirming facts, and you can also validate it against your personal experience or sense of plausibility, and validate the coherence and simplicity of the models used. Second, they affirm the basic competence of humans to explore our world. By centering the process of discovery rather than a finished product, such explanations invite the audience to participate in this process, and perhaps to surprise us with new discoveries.
Having read your story about yeast, what am I now empowered to do, that I previously could not? Make sourdough? But I could already do that; one does not need to know almost any of the stuff you said, in order to make sourdough. (Here’s a page that actually teaches you how to do it. Note that the only significant element it shares with your explanation, is the point that yeast—and the bacteria that are also critical to a sourdough starter—are omnipresent in the environment. Indeed, I don’t even need to know that; I can simply assume that water and flour, left alone, turn into a sourdough starter by sheer magic, and the process will still work fine.) Make commercial-grade yeast? Nope, I couldn’t do that before and I still can’t do it.
Fundamentally, I think that you are conflating two very different things.
First, there are the sorts of explanations that fill in an overall, unified, coherent view of the world. (“Big History” is perhaps the purest example of this approach; and the sort of perspective advocated by Tooby & Cosmides in “The Psychological Foundations of Culture” is a classic example. Other examples abound, of course.) These are, indeed, valuable; they broaden our horizons, and allow us to understand our world as a single, continuous system, that encompasses all the phenomena we are aware of, on all the scales we can perceive. Such a perspective indeed has many benefits. The trouble is, it is difficult to construct, and takes far, far more effort, and more detail, and more scope, than what you’ve provided here. It is also very difficult to be sure that any given part of that unified perspective is correct. Verification is tedious and fraught with peril of error. And one must gain a very broad picture indeed, before it’s possible to use that unified perspective for any practical purposes.
Then there are the sorts of explanations that do, in fact, empower you to accomplish specific goals which you previously could not accomplish or even consider. These look very different from the other sort. They tend to be practical, specific, and circumscribed.[1]
Attempting to combine these things yields insight porn.
[1] To take literally the first example that comes to mind: most people don’t realize that they can easily make vanilla extract—a classic “magical thing produced by a mysterious Scientific-Industrial priesthood in special temples called laboratories or factories”—at home. How? Well, almost any flavor extract you can buy in the store is simply a solution of flavor-bearing compounds in alcohol—which is, as we all learn in chemistry class, an excellent solvent. Therefore, simply buy some vanilla beans, slice them open, and immerse them in vodka for several months. Voilà: vanilla extract. (Note the brevity of this explanation, the lack of history-lesson digressions, etc.)
That is simply an unambiguous standard of evaluation. If, instead, you prefer to aim for “superior to the results produced with store-bought yeast”, by all means, have at it. Relative quality is more difficult to agree upon than indistinguishability, of course; but if your results are sufficiently better, then this concern may not apply in practice.
Should I take your reply to mean that you do, in fact, have “from-scratch-yeast” recipes for all four types of baked goods I listed? I confess, I am now somewhat excited to see them!
I think this is a great comment, and I would maybe like to see this broken out into its own post (after making it a bit more general than this specific circumstance)
Of course, now that you’ve pointed it out, I know what you mean—or do I? I still don’t have anything remotely like a procedure for making cider. But tell me: have you made hard cider from nothing but fresh apples? If so, how did it turn out?
A second’s searching found this website: howtomakehardcider.com. The author of this site says:
Yes, you can make simple “hard cider” with bread yeast, a plastic jug and a balloon on top. If you want help with these crude methods, look for another website, and don’t invite me over for a taste. Blech.
This would seem to refer to the sort of method which you imply. (Right? I’m not quite sure… which is another problem with your claim!) Do you disagree with this fellow’s assessment? When he says that what you need to make hard cider is “Brewing yeast (NOT bread yeast)”, is he wrong?
Are you, in fact, claiming that either you personally, or someone whom you consider quite reliable (as opposed to, for example, “some guy on reddit”), have made hard cider from nothing but fresh apples, and it turned out well (drinkable, delicious, etc.)?
Edit: I was going to make the following point in a follow-up comment, but since Benquo has chosen to disengage (which is certainly his right), I’ll put this here, for the benefit of others reading it:
Suppose that I, having read Benquo’s post, have this insight that “Oh! If wild yeast is everywhere, and it eats sugar, and it produces alcohol, then… I can… just kind of… leave apples sitting around… and they’ll turn into cider?? Right?!”
And suppose I try doing this. What will happen?
What will happen is that I will produce something terrible, and I will be lucky if I don’t give myself food poisoning (due to mold, e.g.).
And then—assuming the experience doesn’t put me off cider-making permanently—I will go online, and I will search for instructions on how to make cider (such as the site I linked above). And those instructions are going to describe a process that is much more complex than the one Benquo implies, and this process will require specialized equipment, and techniques which I could never simply deduce myself from first principles; and, most importantly of all, they will require commercially produced yeast.
But, of course, I could have simply done that in the first place. The “zetetic” explanation—and the misguided attempt to deduce some practical technique from it—adds nothing.
From the first site, I think a clearer statement is from this more specific page, which says
Yeast: Wild or Domesticated
The real truth of using wild yeast is it is just going to depend on where your wild yeast comes from. Most folks at cider mills swear by using wild yeast, but that is because the yeast that lives at their apple processing facilities is especially adapted to work with apples. What about the yeast floating around in your kitchen (or bathroom?) You could end up with fantastic cider, horrible cider, or even vinegar (actually made from bacteria, but I digress).
Indeed. And this, of course, goes to my point: you need to know and understand the specific domain in question in great detail (far greater than that provided in the OP) to make informed decisions, to accomplish anything.
Not aiming to be a full response, but doesn’t the StackExchange link you shared basically say that non-sterile cider isn’t a real issue and that the straightforward thing should basically work?
Basically just wash the apples very well before pressing and practice good sanitation during production.
Use a desired yeast instead of chancing with wild fermentation. Few wild yeasts actually produce favorable results.
Once fermentation is complete the health risks are minimal. Fermented cider is an environment where harmful pathogens can’t survive long. Some molds can produce neural toxins, so if you have black / blue mold use caution.
The second paragraph seems to indicate a problem with using wild yeasts, but my model is that this is basically just about taste, and not about any real risks.
Ah, let me clarify: I linked that page not to claim that contamination/poisoning is a risk, but merely to support the claim that using wild yeast would not yield a satisfactory result (which is why I linked it from the part of the my comment’s text that was about results, not the part about risk).
I think it comes from special temples called laboratories or factories, where it is produced by a mysterious Scientific-Industrial priesthood. Why? Where do you think it comes from?
Do you mean to imply that you can, in the comfort of your own home, produce yeast which is as effective, for all the applications for which it’s used, as this stuff? (Or, even, all the applications for which it’s used by a home baker?) This is an exciting claim! Have you attempted to make money from being able to do so? Or, if you are not inclined to monetize this skill—certainly an understandable position!—would you consider writing a post detailing the process?
What’s your best guess as to what I meant here?
I assumed you meant what you wrote. It does not seem mysterious or confusing, just contradictory. (If you meant something other than what you wrote, well, I guess you’ll want to clarify.)
In case my point was obscure—time travel stories aren’t real, and Robinson Crusoe is also fictional. The sorts of skills that fictional characters use in stories like this, bear, for the most part, little resemblance to the sorts of skills that ordinary, real people use to navigate their ordinary, real lives.
Your yeast example is an excellent example of basically this very point.
Time travel and Robinson Crusoe stories (and zombie apocalypse stories etc) tend to make the assumption that if you “know about” X you can reinvent it from scratch. This implies a standard of knowledge such that you are competent to interact with the thing, and with its precursors, or at least have an idea of how you’d learn to do so. What my mother had learned about yeast in school was completely inadequate for that, but my explanation here is adequate. Learning what yeast is by learning things like its cell structure, scientific name, etc, doesn’t give you a critical piece of information about how it exists in the physical world you navigate—that it’s *already on the flour*.
Like “Truly a part of you” except for material production.
No. Your explanation here is definitely, definitely not adequate.
And the reason you are able to deceive yourself about this, is that—again—such “ reinvent it from scratch” scenarios are totally fictional. You haven’t actually had to reinvent the yeast that we buy in a supermarket from scratch. Like the time travel story and like Robinson Crusoe, all you’ve had to optimize your explanation for is “this makes for fun reading”, not “this actually works”.
On the object level, I read Benquo’s “that” as referring to “make sourdough starter using flour and the wild yeast already present in the flour,” which in fact this post is sufficient for (because it points out that you can just leave out the dough and it will attain sourdough-nature).
The post isn’t called “yeast,” though, it’s called “zetetic explanation,” and is about how explanations try to hook into ontologies. The variation that it’s trying to point out—that some explanations are trying to talk about underlying generators while other explanations are trying to talk about ritual behavior—seems real, though of course explanations in the wild will cover many such levels.
What’s not clear to me is… whether you see the dimension that Benquo is trying to point at, and what specifically you’re trying to fault him for? Like, yes, obviously this post does not contain every fact about yeast. As mentioned in the post:
Which implies that at least half of it, in some sense, is ‘left out.’ But is Benquo’s explanation trying to hook into people’s generators, such that their map of the world has more counterfactual potency than it did before, or is it merely trying to present people with additional rituals they can perform?
The reason that Robinson Crusoe is brought up is not that time travel stories are ‘real’ or part of ‘the ordinary means by which people navigate their lives.’ It’s because there’s variance in ‘the ordinary means by which people navigate their lives,’ with some relying heavily on generators and others relying heavily on rituals, and time travel stories expose the difference, as the person who relies on ritual loses their ritual whereas the person who relies on generators does not lose their generators. A while ago, some housemates were attempting to mash potatoes, but didn’t have a potato masher (as had existed in their childhood kitchen), and were despairing at doing so with a fork. “Use a glass,” I said, demonstrating once. This wasn’t a potato-mashing ritual I had inherited from someone else, but querying my tool generators to find something in the kitchen that was better at mashing that volume of potatoes than a fork. And they seemed somewhat impressed that I could immediately handle their problem and embarrassed that they hadn’t, especially because of how clearly it connected to the dimension that Benquo is gesturing towards here.
I answered this question at some length in this comment.
I confess that this terminology (hooking into generators, counterfactual potency) is unfamiliar to me, so I can’t really answer this. Is there some place where these terms/concepts are explained?
But this isn’t right, is it? Rather, the author of the story describes the person who “relies on ritual” as losing their ritual, and the author of the story describes the person who “relies on on generators” as not losing their generators.
In other words: the quoted part of your comment (and similar sentiments) only make sense as an instance of “generalizing from fictional evidence”.
What does it tell us about reality, that people in time-travel stories who behave in certain ways, get certain results? Not much, I’d say, except that science-fiction authors imagine certain hypothetical scenarios in a certain way, or that readers prefer to read certain sorts of stories, etc.
Indeed, or a whisk, or a wooden spoon, or a hand mixer. I’ve had a number of similar experiences, myself (for example, I once improvised a double boiler with a sauté pan, a saucepan, and a length of string).
But what does this 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.
I had read that comment before I wrote the grandparent, and it still wasn’t clear to me.
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, 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. 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.
[That is, it may well be that while walls are useful, individual bricks are not, and so a strategy of accumulating bricks is useless without also having some focus on architecture, and so it is not particularly useful to highlight the skill of brick-accumulation. I hope it is also clear how the original comment in this chain is not a good pointer towards this presentation of a way in which Benquo’s post could be deeply mistaken.]
I apologize if this response seems overly basic, because I’m genuinely uncertain where the miscommunication is happening here, and so am attempting to cover lots of possibilities.
One hypothesis that seems too simplistic to be right is something like “Said is generally skeptical of counterfactual reasoning.” That is, suppose I perform some behavior (like mashing potatoes with a glass), and we then discuss what would have happened if instead I performed a different behavior (like mashing potatoes with a whisk). Perhaps we have to move from language like “true” and “false” to language like “consistent” and “inconsistent,” but it seems to me that there’s value in considering statements like “If I had tried to mash potatoes with the whisk in my kitchen, it wouldn’t have worked any better than the fork” and value in statements like “that would have been so because the whisk’s tines are thin and easily deformed, enough so that they would be overpowered by the potatoes.”
Now, those are statements about models; we have to modify them to get predictions about reality. For the first one, I have to cash it out in terms of subjective experience during a future test; for the second one, the connection is even less direct, because it’s not just about a future experimental result but what changes to the experimental setup would produce different results. In addition, because they’re statements about models, they have a truth-value of sorts that’s different from the experimental results (the statement ‘Vaniver believes X’ can well be true even if X is itself false, and the statement ‘X is consistent with Y’ can again be true even if X is itself false).
The thing that the time-travel story is doing is not delivering experimental results, because we can’t actually send a scientist and a ritualist back in time and determine what consequences would result. The thing that time-travel stories are doing is proposing experiments that are impossible in reality but accessible with models.
That is, suppose I say “Comparing two people transported from our modern culture to culture A, I think a scientist would be better at surviving than someone who has less understanding of how modern culture is put together or the individual work of understanding and creating culture.” It seems to me like you have many responses, ranging from “I agree, because X” to “I disagree, because Y” to “I don’t think this question is resolvable” to “I don’t think this question is interesting.” It seems to me like there’s interesting material in the first two responses, even if the third response is in fact valid.
A potentially absurd example: it seems to me like there’s a consistent view in which the mathematical technique of proof by contradiction is classed with “generalizing from fictional evidence.” Suppose I am trying to convince Alice that the square root of 2 is a irrational number; I start by saying “suppose it is rational,” step through the argument, and then derive a contradiction. “Therefore,” I conclude, “it is irrational.” Alice replies with “wait, but this conclusion depends on an argument whose premise is false; it seems exceedingly dangerous to allow [arguments whose premises are false] as valid operations in your logic.” How do I convince Alice that proof by contradiction is valid in a way that generalization from fictional evidence is not?
[Once I have such an argument, which perhaps rests on a distinction between various kinds of fictional evidence or a crisper definition of ‘fictional,’ can I generalize that argument to this scenario, not necessarily to rescue time travel stories specifically, but to rescue something adjacent to time travel stories?]
It has to do with the distinction between generators of ritual and rituals, or the invention of tools and the use of tools. The central claims of the OP (as I understand it) are:
1. There is a distinction between using tools and inventing them.
2. This distinction is reflected in explanations, as explanations vary in how much they improve the use of tools and how much they improve the invention of tools.
3. The structure and content of an explanation is linked to how that explanation varies on those dimensions, and that there is a style of explanation that focuses on whys and connections that results in more improvement along the dimension of invention of tools.
4. Many explanations are solely judged on how well they improve tool use in a narrow dimension (because, perhaps, this is the only thing that can be verifiably tested) and one should expect this to lead to explanations that are deficient at improving tool invention.
5. It is desirable to have the ability to invent tools as well as just use them.
[I expect this presentation to be slightly unsatisfying to Benquo, because explanations aren’t just about using them; and so ‘tools’ are a bit too narrow, but are perhaps easier to see than the real thing.]
That example only engages with some of the points; it’s a demonstration of 1 and 5 more than it is 2, 3, or 4. (It’s implicitly an example of 4 in that this is clearly a one-off test; if we want to measure my ability to invent tools, we can’t really ask me to mash potatoes three times in a row, or verify that techniques I generate are original instead of copied.) It also seems important that, in worldview of the OP, my action is not simply “clever” but has a more detailed description of what mental operations led to the new behavior, such that it could perhaps be transferred.
I agree that there’s some real controversy or discernment involved with 3; a detailed botanical understanding of tubers seems unlikely to help, unless it did something squishy like cement a self-narrative as a tool inventor such that my mind even bothered to spend calories looking for a better way to mash potatoes, or it’s the case that a policy of seeking out a connected understanding of the world led to both knowing the botanical understanding of tubers and the ability to improvise a potato masher. And it seems easy to look at botanical understandings of tubers and see some of them as more or less connected to the navigation of lives (and thus likely more or less useful for the invention of tools related to tubers).
I basically agree with your summary of my central claims, and think your treatment of the subject deserves at least a separate comment and ideally a separate post. One thing that’s more obvious to me reading your comment is the extent to which my post is a praise of episteme done right over metis (including metis about pretending episteme).
Thanks for the interpretive labor you’re doing, by the way—I’m constrained by the fact that I’ll naturally feel defensive when someone’s somewhat rudely telling me that I’m talking nonsense, so it’s helpful for you to step in as a third party & try to bridge the gap here.
(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.
(The parent is a long comment and makes several points, so I’m going to answer it in several parts. This is part 3.)
So, first all, it’s not clear to me that this is a good summary of the OP (in the sense that—it seems to me—it adds your interpretation to it, rather than representing the post directly). That being said, I’m not Benquo, so perhaps this is indeed what he meant. But regardless of any of that, let me go ahead and respond to these claims point by point:
This is rather vague. A distinction? What is the nature of this distinction, exactly? I mean, this claim seems trivially true, in some sense, but I’m not sure how important it’s supposed to be, or how fundamental, etc. Elaborations (with details and examples) would help.
So, first of all, it seems to me like either there’s an implication that all human activity can be placed into one of these two categories (“using tools” vs. “inventing tools”). Or perhaps it’s only all human activity of some specific type? If so, what type would that be?
Or, otherwise, the question arises: do some explanations do things other than “improve the use of tools” or “improve the invention of tools”—either instead of, or in addition to? What other things might those be?
Also, is there any correlation between how much any given explanation improves the use of tools vs. how much it improves the invention of tools? Or is this a linear spectrum? Or are these totally orthogonal dimensions? And if there is a correlation, what is its causal origin? (And are these categories even sensible?)
And another question: how does the domain-specificity of an explanation interact with the degree to which “does this improve the use of tools” and “does this improve the invention of tools” even make sense as questions to ask?
This seems much too vague a claim for me to say anything more about it than what I’ve said above, re: #2.
There are actually several claims in here, which must be untangled before they can be addressed. My questions re: #2 seem like reasonable first steps toward untangling this question also.
This is difficult to evaluate. Negate it, and we have:
“It is undesirable to have the ability to invent tools; we should only be able to use tools, not invent them.”
I have trouble imagining who would ever endorse this claim, so #5 is either an applause light… or, it’s an oblique way of suggesting that we should move further in some direction, on some purported spectrum.
Taken that way, we might interpret it as saying that we (for some value of “we”) currently have insufficient ability to invent tools, and should have more. In which case, it seems necessary to make, and defend, an explicit, positive claim about where on this purported spectrum we currently are, as well as a normative claim about where we ought to be. (The prerequisite for all of this, of course, would be establishing the structure of the purported spectrum in the first place, as I comment on above.)
It is not a coincidence that #1 and #5 are, as I say above, the least interesting and most trivial of the claims (at least when taken at face value).
As an aside—though this is not (I think) terribly relevant to the OP—it does not seem to me like the “using tools vs. inventing tools” dichotomy (of which I am still rather skeptical) is all that natural a fit for characterizing your example with the potato mashing. (After all, you didn’t actually invent a new tool!) One could also describe it in some sort of “outside-the-box thinking” terms, or perhaps in terms of some sort of “analytical skills”[1], or perhaps in terms of “seeing the artificiality of purposes”[2], etc. We could have endless fun with the game of inventing plausible paradigms with which to describe this bit of clever thinking on your part… but I do not think the exercise would gain us any useful understanding.
[1] In a fairly literal sense of the word: we might say, perhaps, the you analyzed the act of using a potato masher to mash potatoes—that is, you decomposed the act into its constituent parts, such as “exerting pressure on the potatoes to crush them and deform their structure, breaking them up” and “using an instrument shaped so as to allow downward pressure to be exerted over a wide area”, etc.; and that this analysis, this skill of breaking-down, is what allowed you to synthesize your clever solution.
[2] Namely, of course, the fact that “the glass is for drinking out of” is not a property of the glass, and that the glass simply is the specific physical object that it is; it has no little XML tag attached, where its purpose is stored. We might, perhaps, claim that a keen sense of the artificiality of purpose is what allows one to perceive the possibility of unorthodox uses for designed artifacts.
I meant the latter, and the answer is going to be unsatisfying: the type is “using or inventing tools.” Specifically, note that “inventing” is a subcategory of “using,” worth separating out because it uses cognitively distinct labor (like the sort you refer to as ‘analyzing’). Then the questions are “okay, what fuels that cognitively distinct labor? What explanations make people better at analyzing?”.
This also seems related to all of the other questions you raise in this subsection, where it seems like you’re trying to expand the claim (consider the difference between “A and B are different” and “are you implying that everything is A or B?”, and consider the difference between “there are two dimensions” and “what are the statistical properties of the real world along those dimensions?”). I am sort of torn on this (as conversational technique), because it seems useful at exploring the thing, but also changes the direction of the conversation in a way that increases feelings of friction, or something.
In particular, I have only vague opinions on the statistical properties of explanations in the wild, and so the question puts me in something of a bind where either I share my vague opinions (which, if they get expanded, means I am even further aground, and if they get contradicted, the general point may be lost in the controversy) or somehow dismiss the question (which has its own share of drawbacks), and this bind is an example of the sort of friction this sort of thing can generate.
In the OP, the examples of this are Benquo’s mother and Benquo, in the context of yeast. In general, I don’t think I agree that such claims need to be explicit, and it’s not obvious to me that you have the right standards for ‘defend.’
I expect to be able to broadcast advice on how to lose weight and trust that readers have their own sense of their weight and their own sense of their desired weight and their own sense of their other tradeoffs, such that they judge my advice accordingly, rather than requiring that any advice on how to lose weight come packaged with disclaimers about anorexia and a discourse on what sort of measurements are actually connected to anything good. Those things should exist somewhere, of course—the culture should have ‘anorexia’ as a concept and discuss it sometimes, and should have concepts for things like bodyfat percentage—but requiring not just that they exist everywhere but also that anyone who touches on any part of the topic be an expert on the whole topic dramatically limits what can be said.
Connecting back: the discussion of leavening here reads to me as something like “don’t pretend that you know what leavening is in my presence, you ignoramus!”, which is a move that is occasionally sensible to make (if, say, Benquo claimed to know more about yeast than Said does, a battle of facts to settle the matter seems appropriate) but seems out of place here. [The reasons why it seems out of place here touch on controversies that are long to get into. I am not making a generic “this chills speech and that’s bad” argument as some speech should be chilled; I am instead making a claim of the form “this way to divide chilled and unchilled speech doesn’t line up with the broader goals of advancing the art of human rationality.”]
[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 don’t really follow most of what you say here about types of explanations, conversation directions, and feelings of friction, so I won’t respond to that part. Perhaps the post you mean to write will clarify things.
Concerning this bit specifically:
I think it’s often good to dramatically limit what can be said. I think that there are many cases where most of what can be said—in the absence of such limits—is nonsense; and we should try our outmost to ensure that nonsense cannot be said, and only not-nonsense can be said.
If, indeed, it is the case that Benquo doesn’t know what leavening is, then this is an excellent reason to distrust what he says in the OP. In that hypothetical case (as, absent a reply from Benquo, we still do not know whether it is the case in reality), the fact that it was in my presence that he pretended to that specific knowledge which he does not possess is fortuitous, as it allowed that lack of knowledge to be pointed out, and thus gave all readers the opportunity to reduce their credence in the OP’s claims. (One of the reasons why I so vehemently oppose insight-porn type posts is due to the Dan Brown phenomenon, especially combined with the “Gell-mann amnesia” effect: something can sound very much like real knowledge/expertise, but without an actual expert on hand to verify it, how do we know it isn’t just a pile of nonsense? We don’t, of course. See also Scott’s old post about epistemic learned helplessness, which talks about how explanations can be very convincing while being total nonsense.)
Well, as you say: some speech should be chilled. But I look forward to your more detailed commentary on this matter.
I appreciate the writing and clarity, but also (as we’ve gone over in a few past discussions) disagree on the object level. I ended up downvoting this comment because I think the position it defends is potentially quite damaging on a norms level, but wanted to make it clear that I do not disagree with the phrasing, method of communication, or fact that this comment was written.
(Of course, this highlights problems with karma serving multiple purposes that are sometimes at odds, which I am aware of and would still like to fix, but for now we have what we have)
(The parent is a long comment and makes several points, so I’m going to answer it in several parts. This is part 2.)
The point implied by the original comment in this chain is absolutely critical. It disappoints me to see it (mostly) dismissed, because I think it is emblematic of a deep and pervasive problem with current trends in “rationalist” thought. (I elaborate somewhat further in this comment.)
In a sense, this is, indeed, accurate. I do not mean to recapitulate, here, in this comment thread, the entirety of the philosophical debates about counterfactuals, but my view (which to me to be relatively uncontroversial) is this:
It seems to me that we can have a meaningful discussion about this counterfactual scenario to the extent that we can transform it into questions like:
“What has happened in the past, in situations where I have mashed potatoes with a whisk?”
“What has happened in the past, in situations similar to the above—for example, cases where I have mashed turnips with a whisk, or mashed potatoes with a fork?”
“What do I predict will happen in the future, if I do any of the above things?”
#1 and #2 concern mundane facts, which are known to us. (We can also modify them along the lines of “not I, but my friend Ann, mashed potatoes with a whisk”, or “I heard from my mother about someone who mashed potatoes with a whisk”, etc.) #3 concerns predictions, which become informative once made and then tested.
In the “time-travel story case”, #1 doesn’t apply for obvious reasons; #2 doesn’t apply unless you relax the standard of similarity so far that it becomes useless; #3 also doesn’t apply because—at least for the foreseeable future—we can’t do this experiment. So any discussion about “what would happen” in this imaginary scenario is nonsense; nothing we can say about “what would happen” can be true, or false, in any meaningful way.
The question is unresolvable and uninteresting; I don’t see what there is to agree or disagree about.
I agree that this is absurd. What you’re talking about here is formal systems; that is a very different case. (I originally typed out an extensive rebuttal of your example, but to be honest, it seems to me like it’s simply a non sequitur, which makes the rebuttal moot.)
There are two tracks here:
1) If the point is critical, implying it is perhaps not sufficient, and the thing should be spelled out. Short comments often imply many distinct generators.
In particular, the generator that I think is most obvious is “there’s a genre mismatch between ‘the ordinary means by which people navigate their lives’ and ‘time-travel stories’, as the first is nonfictional and the second is fictional; don’t generalize from fictional evidence!”, but the position that I saw as a more serious objection from Benquo’s point of view was “while there are powerful models here, there’s also insight porn that feels powerful but isn’t; it is not clear that the dimension you highlight separates the two as opposed to leading you towards insight porn.”
2) Whether or not the point is correct. As it happens, I think the second concern (that this doesn’t reliably distinguish insight porn from true insight) is interesting and important, and that the first concern (that time travel stories are completely distinct from ordinary lives) is mistaken.
A brief comment on why it’s mistaken: Robinson Crusoe is a fictional example, yes, but it’s a fictional member of a real class, and in explanatory pieces you should expect the author to use examples the audience will know, and those will generally be fictional examples because of both higher audience recognition and fictional examples can more crisply separate out the real thing. The ordinary means by which people navigate their lives includes losing some foundations of support, venturing into the unknown, and making tools out of their constituent parts; there is a meaningful way in which any programmer who opens up a new text window is doing something cognitively similar to Robinson Crusoe.
[A frame people can adopt, which is sometimes useful, is that they’re an amnesiac time traveler from 3018; what thing can they do now, even though they don’t remember what it is? See Archimedes Chronophone: the point here is a subtle one that’s not “remember something from the future” because you’ve forgotten it, it’s “what happens if I take seriously the possibility that there are major opportunities that are accessible to someone now just because they know something, and what modes of thought might lead to discovering that thing?”.]
[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.”]
This is as good a time as any for me to mention that this term “generators”, which you’ve used a few times now, is not familiar to me in this context. I think I can sort of guess the general meaning from context, but I’m really not sure. Where is it from? Is it idiosyncratic to you, or…?
Anyhow, as to your #1, both objections you describe are important. Yes, don’t generalize from fictional evidence, and also avoid insight porn.
What class? People who’ve gotten shipwrecked? Or people who’ve gotten shipwrecked and managed to sustain themselves via their resourcefulness, etc.? Or something else?
If an author chooses to use a fictional example, then the specific real class of which the fictional example is a member should be identified explicitly, and as many examples as possible of real members of that class should be provided.
I do not at all agree that this is a reasonable expectation. In fact, I think that reliance on fictional examples is a deep and pervasive problem in “rationalist” writing (and thought), and one which has done much to corrupt the epistemics of the rationalist community/movement. I can hardly think of terms too strong in which to object to this practice. I think it would be a very good idea to excise it, root and stem. (Perhaps, one day, we may trust ourselves with the use of fictional examples once more; but not now, and not for some time.)
I’m sorry, but I think that this is an absurd analogy. This is “in some sense…” type reasoning taken much, much too far.
(As for the bit about the chronophone, well… I don’t think it’s critical to your points, so I won’t take up more space and time with my views on it. But if you think it’s a critical point, then I’ll respond to that, as I certainly do have opinions on it.)
I agree time travel is nothing which applies to #1,#2 or #3. However Im curious:
Are time travel stories not taking points #1 and #2 in order to create a szenario to explore #3? Meaning I create a situation and in order to make it explorable and detatch it from people’s expectations I use the literary device of time travel.
I think I can explain this better than it’s currently been explained, but also it doesn’t feel like you’re engaging with the OP’s goals or thesis, and would want to see more effort from you to understand it before engaging further.
(I think in this thread you’ve raised some interesting points about what sort of things are worth learning and teaching, but they were mostly unrelated to Benquo’s point)
It perplexes me to see you say this.
As I say in the latter part of this comment, it seems to me that Benquo’s thesis is fundamentally confused/misguided, in that it attempts to conflate two things which it not only does not make sense to conflate, but is a bad idea to try and do so.
Perhaps you disagree, or think that I’ve misunderstood. Fair enough. But it is strange to say that I haven’t engaged. The linked comment is absolutely the heart of my counterpoint. Almost no one (certainly not Benquo himself) responded to what I said there, or said anything at all relevant, with the exception of Vaniver (whose comment I did not entirely understand, due—apparently?—to terminological issues, but to which I did respond, as you see).
Again, if you think I’ve misunderstood or you disagree with my view, then please do say why; but the claim that I simply haven’t engaged with the OP’s points strikes me as unsupportable.
I’d like to understand why you think the explanation of yeast is inadequate and why, in your opinion, the adequacy of the explanaiton of yeast is of importance to the topic of the article, namely the exploration and typification of a certain style of explaining things.
Said did specify that it’s inadequate for the isolation of supermarket yeast. I agree, but think that this is beside the point; I was trying to give an adequate description of yeast’s role in making bread, not its role specifically in modern industrialized breadmaking.
First of all, bread-making need not be “industrialized” in order to—for all practical purposes—require commercially-produced yeast. If you doubt this, then please provide “from-scratch” (i.e., without using store-bought yeast) recipes of all of the following (results must be indistinguishable from those produced with store-bought yeast):
Challah
“Black bread” (wheat+rye breads such as Darnitsky or Orlovsky)
Brioche
Pizza dough
Second, if you want to explain yeast’s role in making bread, it is not enough to comment that yeast gives off CO2 and thereby leavens the dough. You have to answer the following questions (can you do this without consulting Wikipedia?):
Why should dough be leavened? You say this makes it “nicer” to eat, but how?
Is yeast the only way to leaven dough? What are the two other common leavening methods?
Why are the other leavening methods inappropriate for bread? (Or are they?)
In other words, for an answer to be fully satisfying, to impart the kind of understanding that lets us make predictions, then it needs to not only answer the question of “why X?”, but also “why X and not Y or Z?” (In this case: “why yeast, and not any of the alternatives?”)
Finally, you say:
Having read your story about yeast, what am I now empowered to do, that I previously could not? Make sourdough? But I could already do that; one does not need to know almost any of the stuff you said, in order to make sourdough. (Here’s a page that actually teaches you how to do it. Note that the only significant element it shares with your explanation, is the point that yeast—and the bacteria that are also critical to a sourdough starter—are omnipresent in the environment. Indeed, I don’t even need to know that; I can simply assume that water and flour, left alone, turn into a sourdough starter by sheer magic, and the process will still work fine.) Make commercial-grade yeast? Nope, I couldn’t do that before and I still can’t do it.
Fundamentally, I think that you are conflating two very different things.
First, there are the sorts of explanations that fill in an overall, unified, coherent view of the world. (“Big History” is perhaps the purest example of this approach; and the sort of perspective advocated by Tooby & Cosmides in “The Psychological Foundations of Culture” is a classic example. Other examples abound, of course.) These are, indeed, valuable; they broaden our horizons, and allow us to understand our world as a single, continuous system, that encompasses all the phenomena we are aware of, on all the scales we can perceive. Such a perspective indeed has many benefits. The trouble is, it is difficult to construct, and takes far, far more effort, and more detail, and more scope, than what you’ve provided here. It is also very difficult to be sure that any given part of that unified perspective is correct. Verification is tedious and fraught with peril of error. And one must gain a very broad picture indeed, before it’s possible to use that unified perspective for any practical purposes.
Then there are the sorts of explanations that do, in fact, empower you to accomplish specific goals which you previously could not accomplish or even consider. These look very different from the other sort. They tend to be practical, specific, and circumscribed.[1]
Attempting to combine these things yields insight porn.
[1] To take literally the first example that comes to mind: most people don’t realize that they can easily make vanilla extract—a classic “magical thing produced by a mysterious Scientific-Industrial priesthood in special temples called laboratories or factories”—at home. How? Well, almost any flavor extract you can buy in the store is simply a solution of flavor-bearing compounds in alcohol—which is, as we all learn in chemistry class, an excellent solvent. Therefore, simply buy some vanilla beans, slice them open, and immerse them in vodka for several months. Voilà: vanilla extract. (Note the brevity of this explanation, the lack of history-lesson digressions, etc.)
Why? Why would I care?
That is simply an unambiguous standard of evaluation. If, instead, you prefer to aim for “superior to the results produced with store-bought yeast”, by all means, have at it. Relative quality is more difficult to agree upon than indistinguishability, of course; but if your results are sufficiently better, then this concern may not apply in practice.
Should I take your reply to mean that you do, in fact, have “from-scratch-yeast” recipes for all four types of baked goods I listed? I confess, I am now somewhat excited to see them!
I think this is a great comment, and I would maybe like to see this broken out into its own post (after making it a bit more general than this specific circumstance)
For one thing, make hard cider from nothing but fresh apples.
Cmd-F “cider”: No hits
Cmd-F “apples”: No hits
I beg to differ.
Of course, now that you’ve pointed it out, I know what you mean—or do I? I still don’t have anything remotely like a procedure for making cider. But tell me: have you made hard cider from nothing but fresh apples? If so, how did it turn out?
A second’s searching found this website: howtomakehardcider.com. The author of this site says:
This would seem to refer to the sort of method which you imply. (Right? I’m not quite sure… which is another problem with your claim!) Do you disagree with this fellow’s assessment? When he says that what you need to make hard cider is “Brewing yeast (NOT bread yeast)”, is he wrong?
Are you, in fact, claiming that either you personally, or someone whom you consider quite reliable (as opposed to, for example, “some guy on reddit”), have made hard cider from nothing but fresh apples, and it turned out well (drinkable, delicious, etc.)?
Edit: I was going to make the following point in a follow-up comment, but since Benquo has chosen to disengage (which is certainly his right), I’ll put this here, for the benefit of others reading it:
Suppose that I, having read Benquo’s post, have this insight that “Oh! If wild yeast is everywhere, and it eats sugar, and it produces alcohol, then… I can… just kind of… leave apples sitting around… and they’ll turn into cider?? Right?!”
And suppose I try doing this. What will happen?
What will happen is that I will produce something terrible, and I will be lucky if I don’t give myself food poisoning (due to mold, e.g.).
And then—assuming the experience doesn’t put me off cider-making permanently—I will go online, and I will search for instructions on how to make cider (such as the site I linked above). And those instructions are going to describe a process that is much more complex than the one Benquo implies, and this process will require specialized equipment, and techniques which I could never simply deduce myself from first principles; and, most importantly of all, they will require commercially produced yeast.
But, of course, I could have simply done that in the first place. The “zetetic” explanation—and the misguided attempt to deduce some practical technique from it—adds nothing.
From the first site, I think a clearer statement is from this more specific page, which says
Indeed. And this, of course, goes to my point: you need to know and understand the specific domain in question in great detail (far greater than that provided in the OP) to make informed decisions, to accomplish anything.
Not aiming to be a full response, but doesn’t the StackExchange link you shared basically say that non-sterile cider isn’t a real issue and that the straightforward thing should basically work?
The second paragraph seems to indicate a problem with using wild yeasts, but my model is that this is basically just about taste, and not about any real risks.
Ah, let me clarify: I linked that page not to claim that contamination/poisoning is a risk, but merely to support the claim that using wild yeast would not yield a satisfactory result (which is why I linked it from the part of the my comment’s text that was about results, not the part about risk).
Where do you think commercially-produced yeast comes from?
I think it comes from special temples called laboratories or factories, where it is produced by a mysterious Scientific-Industrial priesthood. Why? Where do you think it comes from?
Do you mean to imply that you can, in the comfort of your own home, produce yeast which is as effective, for all the applications for which it’s used, as this stuff? (Or, even, all the applications for which it’s used by a home baker?) This is an exciting claim! Have you attempted to make money from being able to do so? Or, if you are not inclined to monetize this skill—certainly an understandable position!—would you consider writing a post detailing the process?
It seems like you’re trying to misunderstand here, and being sarcastic about it, and I’m not going to engage further.