iron causal laws coming from deterministic physics and
almost iron “telic laws” coming from regulation by intelligent agents with something to protect.
The latter is something that can also become a very solid (full of Steam) thing to lean on for your choice-making, and that’s an especially useful model to apply to your selves across time or to a community trying to self-organize. It seems very neglected, formally speaking. Economically-minded thinking tends to somewhat respect it as a static assumption, but not so much the dynamics of formation AFAIK (and so dynamic Steam is a pretty good metaphor).
However, shouldn’t “things that have faded into the background” be the other kind of trivial, ie. have “maximal Steam” rather than have “no Steam”? It’s like an action that will definitely take place. Something that will be in full force. Trivially common knowledge. You yourself seem to point at it with “Something with a ton of steam feels inevitable”, but I suppose that’s more like the converse.
(EDIT: Or at least something like that. If a post on the forum has become internalized by the community, a new comment on it won’t get a lot of engagement, which fits with “losing steam” after it becomes “solid”. But even if we want to distinguish where the action is currently, it makes sense to have a separate notion of what’s finished and can easily re-enter attention compared to what was never started.)
Also when you say, in your sunk costs example, “no steam to spend time thinking”, I’d say a better interpretation than “time thinking” would be “not enough self-trust to repledge solidity in a new direction”. Time to think sounds to me more like Slack, but maybe I’m confused.
However, shouldn’t “things that have faded into the background” be the other kind of trivial, ie. have “maximal Steam” rather than have “no Steam”?
I agree that this is something to poke at to try to improve the concepts I’ve suggested.
My intuition is that steam flows from the “free-to-allocate” pile, to specific tasks, and from there to making-things-be-the-case in the world.
So having lots of steam in the “free-to-allocate” pile is actually having lots of slack; the agent has not set up binding constraints on itself yet.
Having lots of steam on a specific task is having no slack; you’ve set up constraints that are now binding you, but the task is still very much in the foreground. You are still often trying to figure out how to make something happen. However, parts of the task have become background assumptions; your attention will not be on “why am I doing this” or other questions like that.
Finally, when steam flows out to the world, and the task passes out of our attention, the consequences (the things we were trying to achieve) become background assumptions.
I’m getting some sort of “steam = heat” vibe from this. You apply steam to heat a situation up until it melts and can be remolded in a new form. Then you relax the steam and it cools and solidifies and becomes part of the background.
More generally it’s like energy or work. Energy is the ability to push against a given force a given distance—to overcome inertia / viscosity and modify the state of the world. After that inertia keeps the world state the same until something else changes it. Perhaps viscosity—probably the wrong term, but I mean the amount of pushback if you try to make a change to worldstate, which might vary depending on the “direction” you want to push things—is also a quantity worth thinking about?
Ooh! More generally, energy is about accelerating a mass through a distance. But momentum remains. Perhaps a way of doing things that is stable has lost steam (acceleration) but retains high momentum?
Thanks for clarifying! And for the excellent post :)
Finally, when steam flows out to the world, and the task passes out of our attention, the consequences (the things we were trying to achieve) become background assumptions.
To the extent that Steam-in-use is a kind of useful certainty about the future, I’d expect “background assumptions” to become an important primitive that interacts in this arena as well, given that it’s a useful certainty about the present. I realize that’s possibly already implicit in your writing when you say figure/ground.
I think some equivalent of Steam pops out as an important concept in enabling-agency-via-determinism (or requiredism, as Eliezer calls it), when you have in your universe both:
iron causal laws coming from deterministic physics and
almost iron “telic laws” coming from regulation by intelligent agents with something to protect.
The latter is something that can also become a very solid (full of Steam) thing to lean on for your choice-making, and that’s an especially useful model to apply to your selves across time or to a community trying to self-organize. It seems very neglected, formally speaking. Economically-minded thinking tends to somewhat respect it as a static assumption, but not so much the dynamics of formation AFAIK (and so dynamic Steam is a pretty good metaphor).
However, shouldn’t “things that have faded into the background” be the other kind of trivial, ie. have “maximal Steam” rather than have “no Steam”? It’s like an action that will definitely take place. Something that will be in full force. Trivially common knowledge. You yourself seem to point at it with “Something with a ton of steam feels inevitable”, but I suppose that’s more like the converse.
(EDIT: Or at least something like that. If a post on the forum has become internalized by the community, a new comment on it won’t get a lot of engagement, which fits with “losing steam” after it becomes “solid”. But even if we want to distinguish where the action is currently, it makes sense to have a separate notion of what’s finished and can easily re-enter attention compared to what was never started.)
Also when you say, in your sunk costs example, “no steam to spend time thinking”, I’d say a better interpretation than “time thinking” would be “not enough self-trust to repledge solidity in a new direction”. Time to think sounds to me more like Slack, but maybe I’m confused.
Indeed, this seems quite central.
I agree that this is something to poke at to try to improve the concepts I’ve suggested.
My intuition is that steam flows from the “free-to-allocate” pile, to specific tasks, and from there to making-things-be-the-case in the world.
So having lots of steam in the “free-to-allocate” pile is actually having lots of slack; the agent has not set up binding constraints on itself yet.
Having lots of steam on a specific task is having no slack; you’ve set up constraints that are now binding you, but the task is still very much in the foreground. You are still often trying to figure out how to make something happen. However, parts of the task have become background assumptions; your attention will not be on “why am I doing this” or other questions like that.
Finally, when steam flows out to the world, and the task passes out of our attention, the consequences (the things we were trying to achieve) become background assumptions.
… Or something like that.
I’m getting some sort of “steam = heat” vibe from this. You apply steam to heat a situation up until it melts and can be remolded in a new form. Then you relax the steam and it cools and solidifies and becomes part of the background.
More generally it’s like energy or work. Energy is the ability to push against a given force a given distance—to overcome inertia / viscosity and modify the state of the world. After that inertia keeps the world state the same until something else changes it. Perhaps viscosity—probably the wrong term, but I mean the amount of pushback if you try to make a change to worldstate, which might vary depending on the “direction” you want to push things—is also a quantity worth thinking about?
Ooh! More generally, energy is about accelerating a mass through a distance. But momentum remains. Perhaps a way of doing things that is stable has lost steam (acceleration) but retains high momentum?
Thanks for clarifying! And for the excellent post :)
To the extent that Steam-in-use is a kind of useful certainty about the future, I’d expect “background assumptions” to become an important primitive that interacts in this arena as well, given that it’s a useful certainty about the present. I realize that’s possibly already implicit in your writing when you say figure/ground.