Wait, wait, I think I see something here. I think I see why we are incapable of agreeing.
If and only if you meant “always” in the first place and want to be less than perfectly accurate. “In the majority of cases” is an inaccurate method of expressing how S-O S’s work—as I mentioned above, with “the largest minority” being the representative entity of the body.
This seems more like a description of how S-O S’s fail.
Can you offer any reason why I should treat S-O S’s as a useful or realistic representational scheme if my goal is to draw accurate conclusions about actual, existing people?
Let me try to make my confusion clearer:
If I come upon a Halloween basket containing fifty peanut butter cups without razorblades, and ten peanut butter cups with razorblades, what is the second-order simulacrum I use to represent the contents of that basket? “A basket of delicious and safe peanut butter cups?”
Is this even a legitimate question, or am I still not grasping the concept?
There is a town. That town is called Simulacraton. Simulacraton is 40% white, 35% black, and 25% hispanic by population. The Joneses of Simulacraton—are a semi-affluent suburban couple and live next door to a black man married to a hispanic woman. The Joneses are the second-order simulacrum of the average household in Simulacraton.
Is this even a legitimate question, or am I still not grasping the concept?
Second-order simulacra will always fail when you use them in ways that they are not meant to be used: such as actually being representative of individual instantiations of a thing: I.e.;, when you try to pretend they are anything other than an abstraction, a mapping of the territory designed for use as high-level overview to convey basic information without the need for great depth of inspection of the topic.
Second-order simulacra, a term coined by Jean Baudrillard, are symbols without referents, that is, symbols with no real object to represent. Simply put, a symbol is itself taken for reality and further layer of symbolism is added. This occurs when the symbol is taken to be more important or authoritative of the original entity, authenticity has been replaced by copy (thus reality is replaced by a substitute).
If I’m reading this correctly, it leaves me even more leery about the value of second-order simulacra.
Also from the article:
Baudrillard argues that in the postmodern epoch, the territory ceases to exist, and there is nothing left but the map; or indeed, the very concepts of the map and the territory have become indistinguishable, the distinction which once existed between them having been erased.
… did you intend for me to read this charitably? At best, it’s a descriptive statement that says that people no longer care about the territory, and talk about maps without even realizing that they are not discussing territory. At worst, it says that reality has ceased to be real, which is Not Even Wrong.
If you want me to understand your ideas, please link me to clearer writing.
I am going to avoid using race or sex examples. I appreciate that you used Simulacraton as an object-level example, as it made your meaning much clearer, but I’d rather not discuss race when I am still unhappy with the resolution of the candy bowl problem.
I will revise my question for clarity:
“What is a reasonable second-order simulacrum of the contents of that basket of candy, and why? If no reasonable second-order simulacrum exists, why not?”
Second-order simulacra will always fail when you use them in ways that they are not meant to be used: such as actually being representative of individual instantiations of a thing: I.e.;, when you try to pretend they are anything other than an abstraction, a mapping of the territory designed for use as high-level overview to convey basic information without the need for great depth of inspection of the topic.
True, but none of the above reservations apply to the bowl of candy.
I am not claiming that the second-order simulacrum should represent the individual candies in the bowl. It may be wrong in any individual case. I am simply trying to convey a useful impression of the POPULATION, which is what you claim that SO S’s are useful for.
I am not pretending that a simulacrum is anything more than an abstraction. I think it is a kind of abstraction that is not as useful as other kinds of abstraction when talking about populations.
I DO want a high-level overview, not a great depth of information. This overview should ideally reflect one REALLY important feature of the candy bowl.
(The statement that I would use to map the basket’s population in detail would be “Ten of the sixty candies in the basket contain razorblades.” The statement that I would use to map the basket broadly, without close inspection, would be, “Several of the candies in that basket contain razorblades.”
if I had to use a second-order simulacrum, I would choose one of the candies with razorblades as my representative case, not the candy without. But this seems to break the plurality rule. Or perhaps, if feeling particularly perverse, I’d say “The candy in that basket contains one-sixth of a razorblade.”)
I believe that second-order simulacra fail badly in the case of the candy basket. And if second-order simulacra can’t handle simple hypothetical cases, shouldn’t I be at least a little suspicious of this mapping strategy in general?
Logos01 probably shouldn’t have brought up Baudrillard, who is among the sloppiest and most obscure thinkers of the last century. Baudrillard’s model of abstraction is pretty terrible. Much better to user analytic philosophy’s terminology rather than post-structuralism’s terminology. In analytic philosophy we talk about abstract objects, “types” or “kinds”. These are ubiquitous, not especially mysterious, and utterly essential to the representation of knowledge. “Electron”, “Homo sapiens”, “the combustion engine”, “Mozart’s 10th Symphony”, “the Human Genome”, etc. To map without abstract objects one would have to speak only of particulars and extensionally defined sets. And that’s just the nouns—whether one can even use verbs without recourse to abstraction is another issue entirely. Open up any scientific journal article and you will see named entities which are abstract objects. There are schools of thought that hold that kinds can ultimately be reduced to classes determined only by resemblance or predicate—in an attempt to dissolve the supposed mystery of what abstract objects are. But even the most strident nominalists don’t propose to actually do away with their usage.
None of that is particularly controversial and that’s basically what Baudrillard means by “second-order simulacra”. Now the question is, to what extent is it permissible to make statements about types which are not true of all of the particulars which instantiate that type? Call these “generalizations”. We know from the limit cases that it can be both permissible and impermissible. “The Bobcat is found in North America” seems true and informative—and yet there are bobcats in zoos outside that region. At the other end “Birds can talk” is mis-informative even though there are a few species of bird that can learn to talk.
The criterion for whether a generalization is permissible is chiefly pragamatic. You wouldn’t say “The candy is safe” if there were a few razor blades mixed in because people are used to not having any razor blades mixed in at all! The fact about the candy that is worth communicating is that there are razor blades in a few of them. You’re trying to warn people!
I think Logos’s race examples above are wrong. Whether one specifies the race of the typical family depends on whether or not race is a relevant variable in what you are trying to communicate. If all you want to do is express to a Boston Red Sox fan that he or she shouldn’t expect to find other fans in New York you would just say “New Yorkers don’t like the Red Sox.” There is no reason to say “New Yorkers are white people who don’t like the Red Sox”—even if the vast, vast majority of New Yorkers were white this would be communicating unnecessary detail given the goal of the communication. But if you’re trying to constrain someone’s expectations about what kind of people they will meet in New York saying “New Yorkers are white people who don’t like the Red Sox” is mis-informative if most or a large fraction of New Yorkers aren’t white people.
These are all simple examples which can be solved by adding another sentence at most. But in discussions of sufficient complexity additional specificity really does become untenable. At the limit demanding arbitrary precision would require you to use quantum field theory to build an airplane (Newtonian physics can be thought of as a generalization of quantum mechanics).
There are special cases. One is that people should include additional, irrelevant details in cases where not including them reinforces a popular belief that such details don’t exist. This is especially true when the additional details are newly discovered. If one is speaking to a crowd that thinks, say, all men are heterosexual, it is worth qualifying statements about men that assume heterosexuality since not saying anything about the existence of homosexuals reinforces the false notion that they don’t really exist or are extremely rare. When speaking to crowds who are very familiar with that information, qualifying it may look like additional, irrelevant information. Relatedly, when hearing about social identity no one likes to feel like they’ve been left out of the map. This is both an understandable feeling and an inevitable problem when trying to talk about issues involving social/cultural identity and experience. Almost always even the most carefully PC essay talking about how group x experience behavior y or institution z will ignore some subset of group x. Social types and kinds are particularly rife with exceptions—there is simply too much individual variation. But at some point you have to generalize to talk about social identity. I think among respectful, tolerant and educated people it is helpful to maintain a constant policy of “Yes, we all know this isn’t true for everyone but this is a useful generalization”. Whether or not it makes sense for Less Wrong to adopt that policy is another question.
Almost always even the most carefully PC essay talking about how group x experience behavior y or institution z will ignore some subset of group x.
Using ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’ as labels to represent variable groups reinforces the pernicious stereotype that other letters aren’t worthy of being used as labels to represent variables and don’t count.
I don’t appreciate how lazy these jokes are. Once posting on LW one would assume unnecessary tribal signaling in the form of easy, form-fillable potshots at the religious, “political correctness,” non-nerd popular culture, &c.
After I write a six-paragraph explanation of abstraction and the pragmatics of generalization I reserve the right to tell a lazy joke.
I think you’re reading too much into the joke though. I wasn’t intending to make fun of political correctness- hopefully what I wrote before makes it clear that that is not my attitude. I did find lessdazed comment humorous both for the meta-ness of turning the subject of the paragraph back on the text itself and for the juxtaposition of the concern for inclusiveness being applied to silly, non-human things like variable letters. So I played along. The joke was a good way of emphasizing that that particular concern about generalizations is not about communication or accuracy, but about how we treat people.
Whether lessdazed was trying to make fun of political correctness or not you’ll have to ask him.
I habsolutely zero intentions. I had hoped that you would be capable of being a rational agent in this dialogue. If, however, that isn’t something you care to do, we can end this conversation here and now.
“What is a reasonable second-order simulacrum of the contents of that basket of candy, and why? If no reasonable second-order simulacrum exists, why not?”
The stereotypical bowl-candy is perfectly safe. It likely has a neighbor that has a razorblade in it.
-- In a side-note, why did you feel the need to push this particular variation of your question on me when I had already answered it? What, exactly, did you think the Simulacraton example was? Or did you not make the connection merely because you used candies and ratios and I used people and percents?
I believe that second-order simulacra fail badly in the case of the candy basket.
Of COURSE they do. It’s not an applicable or relevant scenario in which one SHOULD use a second-order simulacrum in.
The scale is vastly too small to allow for abstraction to be useful.
The topic at hand focuses on the group in question rather than some other topic to which the group is tangential.
And if second-order simulacra can’t handle simple hypothetical cases, shouldn’t I be at least a little suspicious of this mapping strategy in general?
Good luck getting through life without ever constructing a symbolic representation of anything at any time ever under any circumstances: because that’s what you are arguing against.
Downvoted for telling me what I’m arguing for and against, for something like the third time now, when I am fairly certain that our intuitive ideas of how abstraction works are somewhat different. This is one of the few things that breaks my internal set of “rules for a fair argument.”t.
(Note: I am NOT downvoting for the paragraph beginning “OF COURSE they do”, because it’s given me a hunch as to what is going on here, is clearly written, and makes your actual objections to the candy bowl case clearer.
I SHOULD not be downvoting for the first paragraph, but it affected the decision.)
I habsolutely zero intentions. I had hoped that you would be capable of being a rational agent in this dialogue. If, however, that isn’t something you care to do, we can end this conversation here and now.
When I tried to work out what you meant by second-order simulacra, you linked me to a cryptic Wikipedia article discussing a vague description of the term, along with confused-looking statements about the nature of reality. I really did NOT know what your intentions were, and I genuinely was getting exasperated.
I am sorry for implying bad faith. I should have said, “I have no clue what I am supposed to take from this article, but it sends extremely dubious signals to me about the validity of this concept.”
In a side-note, why did you feel the need to push this particular variation of your question on me when I had already answered it?
Because you hadn’t. I presented an example where second-order simulacra fail. Reading the reply, I was unsatisfied to find a description of a different case, followed by a statement that second-order simulacra fail in the candy bowl case, but for reasons that weren’t consistent with the example.
What, exactly, did you think the Simulacraton example was?
An example chosen in which your heuristic gave a semi-plausible answer, when I had asked about a place where it ceases to work.
Or did you not make the connection merely because you used candies and ratios and I used people and percents?
I did. I did not conceive, however, that your answer would be:
The stereotypical bowl-candy is perfectly safe. It likely has a neighbor that has a razorblade in it.
The analogy to the population of people was stretched enough—and not just for reasons of ratios and percents—that there was no WAY I’d come to the above answer without questioning it.
The scale is vastly too small to allow for abstraction to be useful.
The topic at hand focuses on the group in question rather than some other topic to which the group is tangential.
This is getting closer to what I actually am looking for—a situation where I ought to use second-order simulacra. However, I still do not think these are problems for the candy bowl.
1: Abstractions can work on an arbitrarily small sample size. “A bowl of candies, some of which are unsafe” IS an abstraction.. If that is not abstract enough, what about a pie chart showing the proportion of unsafe candies?
If a group is truly tangential to a topic, how do you decide which features are important enough to include in your abstraction? Why include ANY features in your abstraction besides “lives in Simulacraton?” It does no good to say that one would abstract the Joneses as being of the plurality race. For example, I could imagine them as being racially indeterminate. But I have trouble imagining them at all.
Good luck getting through life without ever constructing a symbolic representation of anything at any time ever under any circumstances: because that’s what you are arguing against.
Generally speaking, that is not representations work in my mind. The phrase “generalizing from one example” is ringing a bell right now.
When I am told “the population of Simulacraton is 40% white,” I don’t really feel any need to abstractly represent the population with one person, neighbors or no, or to refer to such a person in conversation. I would not say, “People from Simulacraton are {X},” and I tend to react to such statements with skepticism because I see them as unqualified statements about an entire set of people based on weak evidence.
How do I describe the average family in that town? With reluctance. I default to mapping by groups. In fact, I’m not used to visual or instance-based representation in general. It may be developmental—I was born blind and raised blind for a month before surgery. This may have affected my brain development in odd ways; I’m still bad with faces.
It does seem likely to me that a more visual thinker would find it convenient to imagine an average family as having visibly defined properties representing a plurality, rather than properties that can’t be visually imagined as easily. But my ‘average member’ is just a bunch of loosely defined properties tied together with a name, and many of the properties that are needed to visualize a person clearly are missing from that set.
I don’t think ONLY in verbally described sets, of course. I also think in free-floating sensory memories that rarely remain in my consciousness for very long. But “thinks in sets defined by verbal descriptions” is a good approximation of what I do.
Example: I have never been to Paris. If I were to talk about the Eiffel Tower, and for some reason felt the need to mention a Parisian in the description, I would likely say “a Parisian.” I wouldn’t give them a name or any properties unless I had to. If I did, the properties would be based on what I saw in movies, not any properties that reflect a plurality of Parisians, and I would assign them in a miserly way. My second-order simulacrum would be useless for anything but fake local flavor.
What about questions where “a Parisian” is just a tangential feature, where precision in the description of the Parisian is unimportant? Surely I use a second-order simulacrum then, right?
Nope.
For me, it is cognitively cheaper to not reference “a typical Parisian” when asked a question that tangentially involves people from Paris, because that would require me to represent a typical Parisian symbolically, and I have trouble imagining such a thing as “a typical Parisian.” Instead, I would simply say, “a random Parisian,” and my mental representation of such a Parisian would be the word “Parisian” with attached possible properties, half-formed images, and phrases spoken in movies.
THIS is why qualifiers like “almost always,” “generally”, “about half of the time,” “on occasion”, and “almost never” strike me as informative—they are quick and dirty ways to adjust the sets in my head! They are cognitively cheap for me, though not NEARLY as cheap for me as numerical probability estimates, which are great when people actually bother to give them.
Now, I am not naive enough to think that a “set” is part of the territory itself, but once one starts to cluster entities together, using a second-order generalization may reinforce confusion about the properties of entities in that cluster. When I discourage the use of second-order simulacra without disclaimers, it is not because I fail to realize my set-based map is not the territory, but because many people will name a cluster of entities, pick a single entity from that cluster, generalize to the entire cluster, and imagine that they have actually described a lot of territory in a useful way.
People do this constantly in politicized arguments. Context is not enough, and the more unwilling someone is to add a proviso, the more I suspicious I grow of the reasons that they are unwilling to do so. I suspect that my attitude towards unqualified generalizations is very similar to your attitude toward qualified generalizations. They seem like useless maps to me because I don’t use them and don’t really know how to.
Context is not enough, and the more unwilling someone is to add a proviso, the more I suspicious I grow of the reasons that they are unwilling to do so.
Is this a matter of degree or of kind? It seems to me like the issue here is how many qualifications should be made in particular contexts, and so is a question of degree, and not at all one of kind. This means that there is a possible mind with standards analogous to yours to the same degree yours are analogous to Logos01.
For example, where Logos01 thinks an essay with five paragraphs of content needs one disclaimer, you might think it needs fifty, and some third party might think it needs two thousand and fifty, and some fourth party 125,000. Any criticism you apply to him or her seems applicable to you as well, for all trade off precision for brevity.
It therefore seems impossible to muster a strong argument against Logos01′s general practice of being imprecise for the sake of finishing sentences despite lack of perfect precision, because you do that as well, and so it seems your argument can’t be stronger than a weaker one against a particular balance of trade offs.
Downvoted for telling me what I’m arguing for and against, for something like the third time now, when I am fairly certain that our intuitive ideas of how abstraction works are somewhat different. This is one of the few things that breaks my internal set of “rules for a fair argument.”t.
I made no “intuitive” statements about “how abstraction works”. Ever.
Your positional statements made it quite clear that your objection to S-O S’s was in the fact that they are an abstraction.
You repeatedly made several arbitrary statements about representative symbols and how they would “have” to be that I demonstrated to be inaccurate of how abstraction is done.
I never make the statement, “You are arguing X” unless it is factually and demonstrably true. You stated that you “distrusted” “this method” (“this method” being the use of symbols without referents) of abstraction… but unfortunately, that’s all abstraction is; “making maps.” If you don’t like it when someone tells you what you are or aren’t arguing for or against, don’t put yourself into a position where those statements would be true. If you had said, “The sky is blue”, and I told you, “You are saying the sky is blue”, would you also react so childishly?
The rest of your post is simply too long for me to bother with. This topic has gone beyond my threshold of conversational utility: you demonstrate that you will accept nothing I say at any point and are merely arguing for the sake of arguing. Case in point:
If a group is truly tangential to a topic, how do you decide which features are important enough to include in your abstraction?
They are topical. This is a tautology. And this marks at least the second time I’ve called out your continuing to riddle the topic with questions that have already been answered or have answers whose very questions demonstrate them. This is not the mark of an honest conversant.
Further:
Generally speaking, that is not representations work in my mind. The phrase “generalizing from one example” is ringing a bell right now.
This directly contradicts the very definition of the word, “abstraction”. Abstraction—and mental representation is never anything BUT abstraction—is definitionally constructing simulacra within the mind.
I point this out as yet another demonstrative example of your arguing for what I can only describe merely the sake of arguing.
Rounding this out:
I suspect that my attitude towards unqualified generalizations is very similar to your attitude toward qualified generalizations. They seem like useless maps to me because I don’t use them and don’t really know how to.
No. This is a flat-out false characterization of my position and I have explicitly disagreed with it. I said nothing of the sort. Ever. And I haven’t been arguing in favor of such a position.
You are A) misrepresenting me. B) refusing to accept basic definitions of terminology relevant to this topic, C) continuously raising questions that have already been answered, amongst other things.
I’ll not be responding to you in this topic again.
Wait, wait, I think I see something here. I think I see why we are incapable of agreeing.
This seems more like a description of how S-O S’s fail.
Can you offer any reason why I should treat S-O S’s as a useful or realistic representational scheme if my goal is to draw accurate conclusions about actual, existing people?
Let me try to make my confusion clearer:
If I come upon a Halloween basket containing fifty peanut butter cups without razorblades, and ten peanut butter cups with razorblades, what is the second-order simulacrum I use to represent the contents of that basket? “A basket of delicious and safe peanut butter cups?”
Is this even a legitimate question, or am I still not grasping the concept?
There is a town. That town is called Simulacraton. Simulacraton is 40% white, 35% black, and 25% hispanic by population. The Joneses of Simulacraton—are a semi-affluent suburban couple and live next door to a black man married to a hispanic woman. The Joneses are the second-order simulacrum of the average household in Simulacraton.
Second-order simulacra will always fail when you use them in ways that they are not meant to be used: such as actually being representative of individual instantiations of a thing: I.e.;, when you try to pretend they are anything other than an abstraction, a mapping of the territory designed for use as high-level overview to convey basic information without the need for great depth of inspection of the topic.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Second-order_simulacra
The article says:
If I’m reading this correctly, it leaves me even more leery about the value of second-order simulacra.
Also from the article:
… did you intend for me to read this charitably? At best, it’s a descriptive statement that says that people no longer care about the territory, and talk about maps without even realizing that they are not discussing territory. At worst, it says that reality has ceased to be real, which is Not Even Wrong.
If you want me to understand your ideas, please link me to clearer writing.
I am going to avoid using race or sex examples. I appreciate that you used Simulacraton as an object-level example, as it made your meaning much clearer, but I’d rather not discuss race when I am still unhappy with the resolution of the candy bowl problem.
I will revise my question for clarity:
“What is a reasonable second-order simulacrum of the contents of that basket of candy, and why? If no reasonable second-order simulacrum exists, why not?”
True, but none of the above reservations apply to the bowl of candy.
I am not claiming that the second-order simulacrum should represent the individual candies in the bowl. It may be wrong in any individual case. I am simply trying to convey a useful impression of the POPULATION, which is what you claim that SO S’s are useful for.
I am not pretending that a simulacrum is anything more than an abstraction. I think it is a kind of abstraction that is not as useful as other kinds of abstraction when talking about populations.
I DO want a high-level overview, not a great depth of information. This overview should ideally reflect one REALLY important feature of the candy bowl.
(The statement that I would use to map the basket’s population in detail would be “Ten of the sixty candies in the basket contain razorblades.” The statement that I would use to map the basket broadly, without close inspection, would be, “Several of the candies in that basket contain razorblades.”
if I had to use a second-order simulacrum, I would choose one of the candies with razorblades as my representative case, not the candy without. But this seems to break the plurality rule. Or perhaps, if feeling particularly perverse, I’d say “The candy in that basket contains one-sixth of a razorblade.”)
I believe that second-order simulacra fail badly in the case of the candy basket. And if second-order simulacra can’t handle simple hypothetical cases, shouldn’t I be at least a little suspicious of this mapping strategy in general?
I’m hoping I can butt in and explain all this.
Logos01 probably shouldn’t have brought up Baudrillard, who is among the sloppiest and most obscure thinkers of the last century. Baudrillard’s model of abstraction is pretty terrible. Much better to user analytic philosophy’s terminology rather than post-structuralism’s terminology. In analytic philosophy we talk about abstract objects, “types” or “kinds”. These are ubiquitous, not especially mysterious, and utterly essential to the representation of knowledge. “Electron”, “Homo sapiens”, “the combustion engine”, “Mozart’s 10th Symphony”, “the Human Genome”, etc. To map without abstract objects one would have to speak only of particulars and extensionally defined sets. And that’s just the nouns—whether one can even use verbs without recourse to abstraction is another issue entirely. Open up any scientific journal article and you will see named entities which are abstract objects. There are schools of thought that hold that kinds can ultimately be reduced to classes determined only by resemblance or predicate—in an attempt to dissolve the supposed mystery of what abstract objects are. But even the most strident nominalists don’t propose to actually do away with their usage.
None of that is particularly controversial and that’s basically what Baudrillard means by “second-order simulacra”. Now the question is, to what extent is it permissible to make statements about types which are not true of all of the particulars which instantiate that type? Call these “generalizations”. We know from the limit cases that it can be both permissible and impermissible. “The Bobcat is found in North America” seems true and informative—and yet there are bobcats in zoos outside that region. At the other end “Birds can talk” is mis-informative even though there are a few species of bird that can learn to talk.
The criterion for whether a generalization is permissible is chiefly pragamatic. You wouldn’t say “The candy is safe” if there were a few razor blades mixed in because people are used to not having any razor blades mixed in at all! The fact about the candy that is worth communicating is that there are razor blades in a few of them. You’re trying to warn people!
I think Logos’s race examples above are wrong. Whether one specifies the race of the typical family depends on whether or not race is a relevant variable in what you are trying to communicate. If all you want to do is express to a Boston Red Sox fan that he or she shouldn’t expect to find other fans in New York you would just say “New Yorkers don’t like the Red Sox.” There is no reason to say “New Yorkers are white people who don’t like the Red Sox”—even if the vast, vast majority of New Yorkers were white this would be communicating unnecessary detail given the goal of the communication. But if you’re trying to constrain someone’s expectations about what kind of people they will meet in New York saying “New Yorkers are white people who don’t like the Red Sox” is mis-informative if most or a large fraction of New Yorkers aren’t white people.
These are all simple examples which can be solved by adding another sentence at most. But in discussions of sufficient complexity additional specificity really does become untenable. At the limit demanding arbitrary precision would require you to use quantum field theory to build an airplane (Newtonian physics can be thought of as a generalization of quantum mechanics).
There are special cases. One is that people should include additional, irrelevant details in cases where not including them reinforces a popular belief that such details don’t exist. This is especially true when the additional details are newly discovered. If one is speaking to a crowd that thinks, say, all men are heterosexual, it is worth qualifying statements about men that assume heterosexuality since not saying anything about the existence of homosexuals reinforces the false notion that they don’t really exist or are extremely rare. When speaking to crowds who are very familiar with that information, qualifying it may look like additional, irrelevant information. Relatedly, when hearing about social identity no one likes to feel like they’ve been left out of the map. This is both an understandable feeling and an inevitable problem when trying to talk about issues involving social/cultural identity and experience. Almost always even the most carefully PC essay talking about how group x experience behavior y or institution z will ignore some subset of group x. Social types and kinds are particularly rife with exceptions—there is simply too much individual variation. But at some point you have to generalize to talk about social identity. I think among respectful, tolerant and educated people it is helpful to maintain a constant policy of “Yes, we all know this isn’t true for everyone but this is a useful generalization”. Whether or not it makes sense for Less Wrong to adopt that policy is another question.
Using ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’ as labels to represent variable groups reinforces the pernicious stereotype that other letters aren’t worthy of being used as labels to represent variables and don’t count.
I don’t appreciate your attempt to erase the experiences of the Greek alphabet!
I don’t appreciate how lazy these jokes are. Once posting on LW one would assume unnecessary tribal signaling in the form of easy, form-fillable potshots at the religious, “political correctness,” non-nerd popular culture, &c.
After I write a six-paragraph explanation of abstraction and the pragmatics of generalization I reserve the right to tell a lazy joke.
I think you’re reading too much into the joke though. I wasn’t intending to make fun of political correctness- hopefully what I wrote before makes it clear that that is not my attitude. I did find lessdazed comment humorous both for the meta-ness of turning the subject of the paragraph back on the text itself and for the juxtaposition of the concern for inclusiveness being applied to silly, non-human things like variable letters. So I played along. The joke was a good way of emphasizing that that particular concern about generalizations is not about communication or accuracy, but about how we treat people.
Whether lessdazed was trying to make fun of political correctness or not you’ll have to ask him.
I habsolutely zero intentions. I had hoped that you would be capable of being a rational agent in this dialogue. If, however, that isn’t something you care to do, we can end this conversation here and now.
The stereotypical bowl-candy is perfectly safe. It likely has a neighbor that has a razorblade in it.
-- In a side-note, why did you feel the need to push this particular variation of your question on me when I had already answered it? What, exactly, did you think the Simulacraton example was? Or did you not make the connection merely because you used candies and ratios and I used people and percents?
Of COURSE they do. It’s not an applicable or relevant scenario in which one SHOULD use a second-order simulacrum in.
The scale is vastly too small to allow for abstraction to be useful.
The topic at hand focuses on the group in question rather than some other topic to which the group is tangential.
Good luck getting through life without ever constructing a symbolic representation of anything at any time ever under any circumstances: because that’s what you are arguing against.
Downvoted for telling me what I’m arguing for and against, for something like the third time now, when I am fairly certain that our intuitive ideas of how abstraction works are somewhat different. This is one of the few things that breaks my internal set of “rules for a fair argument.”t.
(Note: I am NOT downvoting for the paragraph beginning “OF COURSE they do”, because it’s given me a hunch as to what is going on here, is clearly written, and makes your actual objections to the candy bowl case clearer.
I SHOULD not be downvoting for the first paragraph, but it affected the decision.)
When I tried to work out what you meant by second-order simulacra, you linked me to a cryptic Wikipedia article discussing a vague description of the term, along with confused-looking statements about the nature of reality. I really did NOT know what your intentions were, and I genuinely was getting exasperated.
I am sorry for implying bad faith. I should have said, “I have no clue what I am supposed to take from this article, but it sends extremely dubious signals to me about the validity of this concept.”
Because you hadn’t. I presented an example where second-order simulacra fail. Reading the reply, I was unsatisfied to find a description of a different case, followed by a statement that second-order simulacra fail in the candy bowl case, but for reasons that weren’t consistent with the example.
An example chosen in which your heuristic gave a semi-plausible answer, when I had asked about a place where it ceases to work.
I did. I did not conceive, however, that your answer would be:
The analogy to the population of people was stretched enough—and not just for reasons of ratios and percents—that there was no WAY I’d come to the above answer without questioning it.
This is getting closer to what I actually am looking for—a situation where I ought to use second-order simulacra. However, I still do not think these are problems for the candy bowl.
1: Abstractions can work on an arbitrarily small sample size. “A bowl of candies, some of which are unsafe” IS an abstraction.. If that is not abstract enough, what about a pie chart showing the proportion of unsafe candies?
If a group is truly tangential to a topic, how do you decide which features are important enough to include in your abstraction? Why include ANY features in your abstraction besides “lives in Simulacraton?” It does no good to say that one would abstract the Joneses as being of the plurality race. For example, I could imagine them as being racially indeterminate. But I have trouble imagining them at all.
Generally speaking, that is not representations work in my mind. The phrase “generalizing from one example” is ringing a bell right now.
When I am told “the population of Simulacraton is 40% white,” I don’t really feel any need to abstractly represent the population with one person, neighbors or no, or to refer to such a person in conversation. I would not say, “People from Simulacraton are {X},” and I tend to react to such statements with skepticism because I see them as unqualified statements about an entire set of people based on weak evidence.
How do I describe the average family in that town? With reluctance. I default to mapping by groups. In fact, I’m not used to visual or instance-based representation in general. It may be developmental—I was born blind and raised blind for a month before surgery. This may have affected my brain development in odd ways; I’m still bad with faces.
It does seem likely to me that a more visual thinker would find it convenient to imagine an average family as having visibly defined properties representing a plurality, rather than properties that can’t be visually imagined as easily. But my ‘average member’ is just a bunch of loosely defined properties tied together with a name, and many of the properties that are needed to visualize a person clearly are missing from that set.
I don’t think ONLY in verbally described sets, of course. I also think in free-floating sensory memories that rarely remain in my consciousness for very long. But “thinks in sets defined by verbal descriptions” is a good approximation of what I do.
Example: I have never been to Paris. If I were to talk about the Eiffel Tower, and for some reason felt the need to mention a Parisian in the description, I would likely say “a Parisian.” I wouldn’t give them a name or any properties unless I had to. If I did, the properties would be based on what I saw in movies, not any properties that reflect a plurality of Parisians, and I would assign them in a miserly way. My second-order simulacrum would be useless for anything but fake local flavor.
What about questions where “a Parisian” is just a tangential feature, where precision in the description of the Parisian is unimportant? Surely I use a second-order simulacrum then, right?
Nope.
For me, it is cognitively cheaper to not reference “a typical Parisian” when asked a question that tangentially involves people from Paris, because that would require me to represent a typical Parisian symbolically, and I have trouble imagining such a thing as “a typical Parisian.” Instead, I would simply say, “a random Parisian,” and my mental representation of such a Parisian would be the word “Parisian” with attached possible properties, half-formed images, and phrases spoken in movies.
THIS is why qualifiers like “almost always,” “generally”, “about half of the time,” “on occasion”, and “almost never” strike me as informative—they are quick and dirty ways to adjust the sets in my head! They are cognitively cheap for me, though not NEARLY as cheap for me as numerical probability estimates, which are great when people actually bother to give them.
Now, I am not naive enough to think that a “set” is part of the territory itself, but once one starts to cluster entities together, using a second-order generalization may reinforce confusion about the properties of entities in that cluster. When I discourage the use of second-order simulacra without disclaimers, it is not because I fail to realize my set-based map is not the territory, but because many people will name a cluster of entities, pick a single entity from that cluster, generalize to the entire cluster, and imagine that they have actually described a lot of territory in a useful way.
People do this constantly in politicized arguments. Context is not enough, and the more unwilling someone is to add a proviso, the more I suspicious I grow of the reasons that they are unwilling to do so. I suspect that my attitude towards unqualified generalizations is very similar to your attitude toward qualified generalizations. They seem like useless maps to me because I don’t use them and don’t really know how to.
Is this a matter of degree or of kind? It seems to me like the issue here is how many qualifications should be made in particular contexts, and so is a question of degree, and not at all one of kind. This means that there is a possible mind with standards analogous to yours to the same degree yours are analogous to Logos01.
For example, where Logos01 thinks an essay with five paragraphs of content needs one disclaimer, you might think it needs fifty, and some third party might think it needs two thousand and fifty, and some fourth party 125,000. Any criticism you apply to him or her seems applicable to you as well, for all trade off precision for brevity.
It therefore seems impossible to muster a strong argument against Logos01′s general practice of being imprecise for the sake of finishing sentences despite lack of perfect precision, because you do that as well, and so it seems your argument can’t be stronger than a weaker one against a particular balance of trade offs.
I made no “intuitive” statements about “how abstraction works”. Ever.
Your positional statements made it quite clear that your objection to S-O S’s was in the fact that they are an abstraction.
You repeatedly made several arbitrary statements about representative symbols and how they would “have” to be that I demonstrated to be inaccurate of how abstraction is done.
I never make the statement, “You are arguing X” unless it is factually and demonstrably true. You stated that you “distrusted” “this method” (“this method” being the use of symbols without referents) of abstraction… but unfortunately, that’s all abstraction is; “making maps.” If you don’t like it when someone tells you what you are or aren’t arguing for or against, don’t put yourself into a position where those statements would be true. If you had said, “The sky is blue”, and I told you, “You are saying the sky is blue”, would you also react so childishly?
The rest of your post is simply too long for me to bother with. This topic has gone beyond my threshold of conversational utility: you demonstrate that you will accept nothing I say at any point and are merely arguing for the sake of arguing. Case in point:
They are topical. This is a tautology. And this marks at least the second time I’ve called out your continuing to riddle the topic with questions that have already been answered or have answers whose very questions demonstrate them. This is not the mark of an honest conversant.
Further:
This directly contradicts the very definition of the word, “abstraction”. Abstraction—and mental representation is never anything BUT abstraction—is definitionally constructing simulacra within the mind.
I point this out as yet another demonstrative example of your arguing for what I can only describe merely the sake of arguing.
Rounding this out:
No. This is a flat-out false characterization of my position and I have explicitly disagreed with it. I said nothing of the sort. Ever. And I haven’t been arguing in favor of such a position.
You are A) misrepresenting me. B) refusing to accept basic definitions of terminology relevant to this topic, C) continuously raising questions that have already been answered, amongst other things.
I’ll not be responding to you in this topic again.