On Better Mental Representations Part I: Adopting ‘Thinking Tools’
If you don’t mind an introduction using some poppy philosophical thinking, please indulge me as I channel Alan Watts. Correct me if I am wrong but if I remember Watts once spoke or written about how we misconstrue our representations of things for the actual things. In extension of that, we can also say (as we measure) that we also misconstrue our ‘valuation’ of things to be the things themselves.
Watts gave out a quite clever example of this which involves wood (natural resource) and inches (measurement). Let me roughly paraphrase through this anecdote (adding some creative flair or more honestly winging it without watering down the gist).
There’s a foreman and his men building a house. They had all the natural resources that need be there to build an adequate house for a small family of four. But for some “price shock” in the “Platonic” realm, the currency of measurement by inches ran out of circulation.
The foreman told his workers. “Sorry, fellas. We can’t finish building the house anymore. We have ran out of inches.”
“What do you mean? We still have planks, nails, tools like hammers, and enough man power to finish building the house.”, answered a carpenter amongst the team.
The foreman replied, “Sorry, Edward. You don’t understand. The world has ran out of inches.”
Ludicrous isn’t it? This is also how many of us think about the “value” of things. We think of them in monetary value. Inches, like money, is a representation of something: the length of some thing. It is not the thing itself. It is a measure.
It’s the same thing as money. It’s something that has no intrinsic value. We only give value to it. We internally represent in our minds that it has value.
I am not saying money is bad, useless, or the root of all evil, Jesus forbid. I’m just saying that it is similar to what the “inches” there serves in the anecdote. It serves, almost, as the end all be all of valuation. We, often times, confuse our representations of things to be the things themselves; i.e. we mistake concepts of things to be the things themselves.
But this is to be expected. We do think of things as how they are in our representations. This is all we can ever do. It is only from these representations that we can glean into reality. They both enable and limit our capacity to “capture” things and their features from our environment. This goes both for our body and our minds (forgive the dualism, it’s just a matter of getting the point across easier).
BIO-APPROXIMATORS AND CONCEPTUAL APPROXIMATORS
Firstly, evolution has “gifted” us with a biology that can approximate reality. We now know, through science, that what we call visible light is just a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that our human eyes can detect. It is but a part of the whole picture. What we detect is just an approximation of which there is there.
Of course, if exposed to it we don’t really smell coconuts, suntan lotion, and sea breeze. We smell highly similar smells. We can manipulate “signals” to act “dishonestly”.
In nature (or the wild, to be more precise), animals, mostly with no comprehension of doing them, emit such dishonest signals. A fiddler crab is known for having one much larger claw. If it should lose it in a battle with another male for a female, another weaker one grows. It’s lighter and less effective than the original. But this ‘weaker one’ still looks the part and can scare other males away before they engage in combat. This is considered to be a dishonest signal. It’s the same thing with the famous cuckoo bird and reed warbler dynamics. In the latter’s case, it’s one species against another.
But one good thing about being human is that we have conceptual approximators. These extends the “bare” capacities of our bio-approximators to understand things that evolution didn’t specifically selected for us to understand. These are what Dan Dennett called ‘thinking tools’ . They are imagination extenders and focus-holders.
Examples of them are calculus and Bayesian inference. There are those that are mathematical in nature (abstract). There are those that are explanatory and predictive ‘narratives’. Many are used by the people of science. These are quite powerful.
Like the radio telescope helps us “see” (or perceive) things our eyes normally wouldn’t see (or just a plain telescope), these conceptual tools of thought let’s our “mind’s eye” see things that we, without them, couldn’t “see”.
Urbain Le Verrier just used mathematics to predict the location of an undiscovered accurately. It extended his imagination. That planet is Neptune (it didn’t work for “Vulcan” though). Einstein was famous for using thought experiments for his great achievements. Extremists use their morals derived from “reason” to cause havoc and spread misinformation.
Wait what? Yes. Thinking tools are not created equal. Some may be better than others. Some are just plain dumb and dangerous. The problem is that ideologues or carriers of these faulty thinking tools mix effective “signalling” with intellectual hogwash.
Like how an “upside down goggles” can trick our eyes to see the world upside down (some people can adjust rather quickly), concepts and ideologies can also trick our “mind’s eye” to see the world upside down (and still some people can adjust rather quickly, Flat Earth).
What’s going on here is that ideologues use signals that would make them look legitimate, scientific, or deep. They try to look the part to play the part. This shows in their works. In the way they use facts and “facts” together. It’s hard to develop a trained “mind’s eye” to see such things. We can be tricked.
This is why constant testing of our selves and the tools we wield is a good exercise. Where do we test these? We send them to academic journals (the good ones who review well). We share them in a community like this. We test them in conferences or meetups to be judged and questioned by peers and other experts. We get chastised and we get helped.
While it doesn’t feel good to be wrong naturally, but there is overwhelming joy to not being wrong anymore. Or, in many cases, to be less wrong.
Be Less Wrong. It’s a good thing to find this rational community where people are encouraged to be “less wrong”. This is exactly the direction that science has been going for. Sometimes science an be exact but at other times, all we can do is to be less wrong about things and be happy with it. Well, this is before more clever folks open the doors. For now, I think many will not be opened ever.
The adoption of tools (physical and conceptual), how their use become robust, and how they are past over from a generation to generations does not just depend upon the efficiency and honesty of such tools. It depends upon the communities that wield them. Just like in biological evolution, a gene couldn’t spread without a population. Good thinking tools couldn’t make their mark in the evolutionary cultural timeline without agents to pass them on, to pass through, and to be in.
As clever as hairless apes can be, humans managed with considerable success to do influence the frequency of genes through engineering. Gene drive is a technology that can help stifle the population of the mosquitoes that carry malaria. It is by cutting out the ability of a mosquitoes to carry malaria or cutting the ability to pass on its genes by making it infertile. This technology of driving a particular combination of genes in a population has even gotten funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Scientists execute the gene drive through introducing genetically-altered agents carrying harmless and long-lasting genes into a ‘harmful’ population to infiltrate it, propagate their “specially prepared genes” in it to lessen the frequency of harm-causing genes endemic in the population in the first place. I argue that it’s the same thing with ideas and thinking tools.
Causes have their lobbyist, ideologues, and propagandists. They infiltrate institutions like the government, education, and the media with the goal of spreading their way of thinking. It is through ‘tapping’ in many communities that they can likely spread these concepts.
For the people who hold rational thinking high up in the pedestal (I think I do belong in this demographic), they don’t have many of these specialists. I even say that it is such a loose community as many in it are too busy within their own areas of research. There is no bloc. Many would like to do away with the politics of it and just focus on gazing into the glorious light at the edge of human understanding.
But there is no time to waste. These tools for the “mind’s eye” need to be cultivated in communities. It is time for people in rational communities like this to act as agents of change; not to force feed reason and science into others but to cultivate the very same interest that got themselves hooked in the first place; not to make enemies but peers.
Of course, this is the ideal. It doesn’t necessarily hold in reality. I’m sure many of us have bumps along the way. It’s not easy. But as UFC featherweight champion Jerome Max Halloway says “It is what it is.”
I’m not high on the “meme” concept but I think it works fine here with not much of a bad intellectual repercussion. Just like the gene drive it’s high time for intense meme drives to let other people out there with the germ for the love of wisdom to get high on clearer thinking; to adopt thinking tools in their attempts to do thinking better.
As Bo Dahlbom, a computer scientist, philosopher, and former student of Dan Dennett, states:
“Just as you cannot do much carpentry with your bare hands, there is not much thinking you can do with your bare brain.”
For Part II. In the second part of this series, I’ll delve more on the concept of the degrees of accuracy and rationality.
References:
Abrahams, M. (2017, February 22). Experiments show we quickly adjust to seeing everything upside-down. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable-research-seeing-upside-down
Bereznak, A. (2014, June 17). Harvard Scientists Send the First Transatlantic Smell via iPhone. Retrieved from https://finance.yahoo.com/news/harvard-scientists-send-the-first-transatlantic-smell-89078729859.html
Backwell, P. R., Christy, J. H., Telford, S. R., Jennions, M. D., & Passmore, J. (2000). Dishonest signalling in a fiddler crab. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 267(1444), 719-724.
Conner-Simmons, A. (2015, April 14). How three MIT students fooled the world of scientific journals. Retrieved from https://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scientific-journals-0414
Dennett, D. C. (2013). Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking. WW Norton & Company.
Dyer, H. T. (2018, May 2). I watched an entire Flat Earth Convention for my research ? here’s what I learnt. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/i-watched-an-entire-flat-earth-convention-for-my-research-heres-what-i-learnt-95887
Encylopaedia Brittanica. (2017, July 21). Human ear—The physiology of hearing. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/science/ear/The-physiology-of-hearing
Kelland, K. (2018, April 18). Gates backs gene technologies in fight to end malaria. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-malaria-gates/gates-backs-gene-technologies-in-fight-to-end-malaria-idUSKBN1HP2QF
Twilley, N. (2016, April 27). Will Smell Ever Come to Smartphones? Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/is-digital-smell-doomed
Watts, A. W. (2010). Does It Matter?: Essays on Man s Relation to Materiality. New World Library.
Worral, S. (2015, November 4). The Hunt for Vulcan, the Planet That Wasn’t There. Retrieved from https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/151104-newton-einstein-gravity-vulcan-planets-mercury-astronomy-theory-of-relativity-ngbooktalk/
Wyss Institute. (2017, August 18). CRISPR-Cas9: Gene Drives. Retrieved from https://wyss.harvard.edu/media-post/crispr-cas9-gene-drives/
I’m kinda confused why this is being downvoted. Curious if the people doing so could give more explicit feedback?
It seems rambling and lacking a clear point or a structure that I can follow.
Do you disagree? Do you see valuable content here? If so, I’d be glad if you could summarize the thrust of this essay!
I agree with the rambly thing, and am not that surprised that it got downvoted at all, I guess just sort of surprised it got downvoted as heavily as it did. (It’s the sort of post I personally would have probably neither downvoted nor upvoted)
The thing I got out of this post (and the previous one) was a better understanding of the “the way you process information is a bit arbitrary.” This wasn’t a new point (it’s pretty well covered by the entire Sequences), but both posts dived into a bunch of concrete examples that fleshed out some of the details around “how my lens can perceive it’s flaws.”
I agree the point wasn’t made very clearly, and towards the end starts throwing a few too many concepts out there at once while speaking in a somewhat over-the-top tone. I felt like this was counterbalanced a bit by hitting some notes that LW posts haven’t often hit of late, such as actually providing citations and grounding philosophical ideas in scientific fact. (I admit I didn’t look too deeply into either of those, and it’s possible it’s just sort of goodharting on that concept, but on the margin I’d like to encourage that sort of thing on LW more)
Mostly I just didn’t want Will to end up getting quietly downvoted with no feedback, because I felt like was enough substance here that, if some of the particular shortcomings were addressed, there’d be a solid post here and I’d expect future good posts as well.
[On an even more meta note, we’re still figuring out exactly how strict the standards for frontpage should be, now that it’s up to admins to move things there. This post was on the fence—it checks the official checkboxes for frontpage, could have used more clarity, conciseness and structure and maybe some subtle cultural tweaks (some of the writing style felt… more like a Medium post than a LW post? which I’m not sure how to weight)]
… is −5 really “heavily”? That’s, like, 2 people’s worth of downvotes.
Anyway, yeah, my feedback is definitely “rewrite this post so that it’s clearly comprehensible”.
By this I mean: (a) make it comprehensible; (b) make it clear that it is comprehensible. The former without the latter looks like, e.g., “yes, it’s actually clear what is being said once you do indeed hunker down and read the whole thing carefully, straight through, from beginning to end”. This is insufficient, however, because it is not at all sensible for me to read every single post, closely and carefully, from beginning to end, just on the chance that it might be comprehensible and then also might contain useful insights.
So make it not just comprehensible, but clearly so: write well and engagingly; include a summary—preferably, both at the start and at the end; if your post is long-ish, or is not written quite so engagingly that one can read through it breathlessly, as if reading a fiction story, then include proper “scaffolding”—i.e., organize your post into a hierarchical structure, with sections titled with proper headings (and for god’s sake make your headings actual heading elements, not just bold text—that way, it’s much easier to scan/skim/etc., and it means that tables of contents can be automatically generated for your post!); and so on.
Is this a lot to ask? Well, yes, but on the other hand all of these things are nothing more than “ordinary standards of good writing”! And if you don’t even try, if you don’t do any of these things, then I have to wonder how much you care about whether I read your post… in which case, the natural follow-up question is, how much should I care about reading your post?
This reminds me of something that I’ve been meaning to ask for a while. Does LW support (policy-wise, I mean) the idea of posting something on one’s personal blog, and then expressing some preference about whether or not the mods should promote it to the front page? Note, I don’t mean “promote this, guys! it’s real great!”, but the other way around: “this is not really front-page worthy, imo, I am not comfortable with it being promoted” (vs. the presumptive default of “if you find this worthy of the front page, by all means promote it”). Or is the idea that if I post something that I don’t think should be front-paged, then I shouldn’t post it at all? (I can certainly see the sense in the latter view, if indeed this is the official policy—I’m just trying to figure out what the norms are.)
I pretty much agree with this. (fyi, this got upvoted and downvoted multiple times today, if it was a single −5 downvote I wouldn’t have made my comment)
We’ve talked about it, and the only hesitation I have around it is complexity cost. (i.e. there’s a list of flags about-as-useful you might add to a post page, but which collectively might make for a weirdly high number of choices to make when posting).
Oh, it’s not pretty much front page worthy the way I wrote it. There’s no question about that. It’s pretty conversational (rambly as you guys say) and is using persuasion at the end. I think that’s a big no-no to be on the front page.
Also, I’m new here. And I’m glad to have to have found this online. I actually thought that one has to “submit” to the mods something to be considered to be in the front page. I was looking for that button when I wrote my first article which I think was front-page material. I really wanted it to be considered for the front page. It got there. I don’t know how.
If you have read the first one, it’s quite different as to how it’s written.
This second one was a more personal blog post. This was something that I just wanted to have on my personal blog like a series. It’s not addressed to the usual member of the community. I had a gut feel that it won’t speak to the usual member of the community. This confirms it.
I’m glad that the LW community is quick to chastise things like that and, so far, I like it here. I’ll be more clearer in my next posts here and do away with that conversational style and stick to “technical” topics: like things in my academic research.
Thank you Raemon for the comment and for asking for reasons and feedback. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Said Achmiz for engaging. I now have a better grasp of the content that one should post here and the type of writing.
Feel free to point me to a better direction in the future. I appreciate it.
Rock and roll!