Yeah, but that’s an easier skill that more people have.
This seems obviously false to me. Coming up with good abstractions is nuanced and most people suck at it. I have put a lot of work into it, and consider myself decent compared to the average person, but still suck at it.
I see you’ve chosen to explain your point by way of an example of how you’d have difficulty coming up with an example. If you would make this meta-example of yours more specific by also naming an example of the higher-level point you might desire to make, then I’ll be able to respond productively :)
I don’t get what you’re trying to say here, because it’s not… specific enough. Can YOU give an example of how you would like me to give an example.
Edit:
What I’ve written reads as fairly antagonistic to me, so I want to make a few things clear:
1. I believe that specificity is an incredibly useful skill, and am sort of known among my friend group for saying “can you give me an example of that?”
2. I think everything you’ve written so far has framed useful skills that will actually help.
3. I respect you personally and recognize that you’re a deep thinker and have thought about this a lot.
What I’m really uncomfortable about is the tone and perceived axioms of the sequence, like:
People are being abstract because they’re being lazy.
The right move is to always get more specific.
Talking in the abstract means that you’re using sloppy reasoning.
A lack of acknowledgement that this is simply one skill, and that moving upwards correctly is another.
Thanks for being so non-antagonistic (and nice). This is really what makes LW special.
Coming up with good abstractions is nuanced and most people suck at it. I have put a lot of work into it, and consider myself decent compared to the average person, but still suck at it.
I believe you, I just think that, quantitatively speaking, failures of specificity are currently more common and unnoticed than failures of abstraction. If this seems like a crux for us, I think a good next step to resolve it would be for you to provide a specific example of the kind of abstraction challenges you’re referring to.
I don’t get what you’re trying to say here, because it’s not… specific enough. Can YOU give an example of how you would like me to give an example.
We’re so far from the object level right now 😂
Ok you originally wrote:
Most of the thinkers I know who I perceive as really getting at the truth can move both ways on the abstraction ladder, and in particular often move up the ladder of abstraction for purposes of generativity: If I’m talking about my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, it’s very unclear how I would go about changing how that works, because it’s price is a product of the broader system.
An example of that would be that you’re talking about my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and the abstract point you want to make is that “the government should provide a grant program for authors where they get paid an hourly wage during the time they’re writing the book and no royalties”. Then you would simply tell me that in this example, my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird from Amazon would only have cost me the cost of shipping (which could potentially be free with my Amazon Prime membership).
Ahh I see. So I think a confusion here is that I often think that framing the problem in the abstract often happens BEFORE a specific solution is reached.
One model I really like for this is the TRIZ Prism for problem solving. The idea is you start with a *specific problem* which you then frame as an *abstract problem*, which then allows you to brainstorm an *abstract solution* which then frames a specific solution. So, we might start with a specific thing like “Authors aren’t getting enough for their books” and then BEFORE I come up with a solution, I might say “one way to frame this is Marx’s idea of needing to own the means of production”.
Now, this doesn’t suggest a specific solution, and if you ask me for “specifically, what solution are you suggesting?” my response is “Well I don’t know yet, I just want to explore this frame and see what comes out of it, and what abstract solutions we can arrive at at this level of abstraction.” It would be important, AFTER a few abstract solutions are explored, to go back to specifics and ask how that would look in this specific situation. However, the skill of NOT going specific too soon is important here. Hopefully that gives you a specific example of why I don’t want to provide a specific example in this specific example :)
Another related idea around abstraction vs. specificity is the idea of always having to “define your terms up front.” I remember a particular conversation I was in with rationalists where someone asked what people considered “thinking vs. feeling”. The whole idea here was to explore the different ways people held concepts in order to understand each other better. However, one of the rationalists kept insisting that we first define what we meant by thinking and feeling, so that we didn’t end up with language disagreements. However, the whole point was to explore those disagreements in order to understand people’s experience. This is different from the example above, but its’ another great example of where a specificity move (define your terms) is actually getting in the way of a generative conversation.
This seems obviously false to me. Coming up with good abstractions is nuanced and most people suck at it. I have put a lot of work into it, and consider myself decent compared to the average person, but still suck at it.
I don’t get what you’re trying to say here, because it’s not… specific enough. Can YOU give an example of how you would like me to give an example.
Edit:
What I’ve written reads as fairly antagonistic to me, so I want to make a few things clear:
1. I believe that specificity is an incredibly useful skill, and am sort of known among my friend group for saying “can you give me an example of that?”
2. I think everything you’ve written so far has framed useful skills that will actually help.
3. I respect you personally and recognize that you’re a deep thinker and have thought about this a lot.
What I’m really uncomfortable about is the tone and perceived axioms of the sequence, like:
People are being abstract because they’re being lazy.
The right move is to always get more specific.
Talking in the abstract means that you’re using sloppy reasoning.
A lack of acknowledgement that this is simply one skill, and that moving upwards correctly is another.
Thanks for being so non-antagonistic (and nice). This is really what makes LW special.
I believe you, I just think that, quantitatively speaking, failures of specificity are currently more common and unnoticed than failures of abstraction. If this seems like a crux for us, I think a good next step to resolve it would be for you to provide a specific example of the kind of abstraction challenges you’re referring to.
We’re so far from the object level right now 😂
Ok you originally wrote:
An example of that would be that you’re talking about my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and the abstract point you want to make is that “the government should provide a grant program for authors where they get paid an hourly wage during the time they’re writing the book and no royalties”. Then you would simply tell me that in this example, my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird from Amazon would only have cost me the cost of shipping (which could potentially be free with my Amazon Prime membership).
Ahh I see. So I think a confusion here is that I often think that framing the problem in the abstract often happens BEFORE a specific solution is reached.
One model I really like for this is the TRIZ Prism for problem solving. The idea is you start with a *specific problem* which you then frame as an *abstract problem*, which then allows you to brainstorm an *abstract solution* which then frames a specific solution. So, we might start with a specific thing like “Authors aren’t getting enough for their books” and then BEFORE I come up with a solution, I might say “one way to frame this is Marx’s idea of needing to own the means of production”.
Now, this doesn’t suggest a specific solution, and if you ask me for “specifically, what solution are you suggesting?” my response is “Well I don’t know yet, I just want to explore this frame and see what comes out of it, and what abstract solutions we can arrive at at this level of abstraction.” It would be important, AFTER a few abstract solutions are explored, to go back to specifics and ask how that would look in this specific situation. However, the skill of NOT going specific too soon is important here. Hopefully that gives you a specific example of why I don’t want to provide a specific example in this specific example :)
Another related idea around abstraction vs. specificity is the idea of always having to “define your terms up front.” I remember a particular conversation I was in with rationalists where someone asked what people considered “thinking vs. feeling”. The whole idea here was to explore the different ways people held concepts in order to understand each other better. However, one of the rationalists kept insisting that we first define what we meant by thinking and feeling, so that we didn’t end up with language disagreements. However, the whole point was to explore those disagreements in order to understand people’s experience. This is different from the example above, but its’ another great example of where a specificity move (define your terms) is actually getting in the way of a generative conversation.