Well, to be honest, the horse metaphors/examples/whatever don’t really resonate with me. I’m not sure what to do with them, truth be told. The fact is that people aren’t horses. Dealing with a person—who can think about what you’re doing, and understand your motivations, and modify their own behavior accordingly, and draw on reputation, and prior knowledge, and rumor, and possesses all those wonderful evolved psychological adaptations for dealing with other humans in social situations, etc.—is not like dealing with a horse, or any similar sort of animal. (I mean, if your analogies involved chimpanzees, I’d still be dubious, but less so—but horses…?)
Oh huh, that’s interesting. I was expecting people to resonate less with the horse examples than I do, but it sounds like you don’t find them helpful whatsoever, which I find kind of surprising.
In the specific case of horses, I think my intuition that they can provide helpful info about humans would probably be hard to explain from scratch—it’s based on a lot of small examples of me comparing and testing things in my own experience.
More generally though, I’m curious if you find people talking about our “reptile brain” or “monkey brain” to be similarly useless? I agree with you that chimps are a better approximation of humans than either horses or crocodiles, but “social mammal brain” seems to me to fit naturally between “reptile” and “monkey” in the space of evolutionarily-valid-seeming claims-of-analogy. It’s absolutely true that these analogies are a long way from perfect—a prefrontal cortex changes a huge amount of how we respond to reptilian urges, and language changes a huge amount of how we engage in monkey status games—but that doesn’t seem to me to undercut their usefulness as analogies/inspirations.
(I’ll also note that my previous comment was about a human’s attitude/intention towards a horse, which seems like it *is* relevant to the question in your previous comment about reasons for high/small, but that’s a separate and less fundamental question.)
More generally though, I’m curious if you find people talking about our “reptile brain” or “monkey brain” to be similarly useless?
I do indeed (and in fact I find this verbal/conceptual habit to be rather annoying).
The thing about analogical thinking is that it can be very dangerous—in several ways, but in one particularly insidious one: it’s easy to forget to tie the argument back to the actual thing you’re talking about. In other words, what I often see is that someone will say “ok, now imagine [some analogy]… in this scenario, blah blah… and therefore, blah blah… and so obviously, blah blah…”—and throughout all of this, they’re still talk about the analogy! I read such things, and I think: “ok, yes, now how do all of your claims, arguments, conclusions, etc., look when you translate them back to the real thing that all of this is an analogy for?”
In other words, analogies are good if they’re used as scaffolding, so to speak, to clarify the shape of an argument or a model, to help your interlocutor understand what you’re saying about reality.[1] But you had better actually have a real argument, with claims about real things, etc.! If you just have the analogy, and all your reasoning is in the analogy-world, and all your conclusions are in the analogy-world, then that’s useless at best, and tremendously misleading at worst. Analogical thinking cannot replace reasoning about the real world. If it does that, then it’s detrimental, not helpful.
[1] The proper structure, therefore, goes like this:
“I am making an argument that [insert claim about reality]. As an analogy, consider [analogical scenario]; in that case, we can see that [reasoning in the analogy-world]; and therefore, [conclusion in the analogy-world]. And so in reality: [analogous reasoning in the real world]; and therefore, [conclusion in the real world].”
In the specific case of horses, I think my intuition that they can provide helpful info about humans would probably be hard to explain from scratch—it’s based on a lot of small examples of me comparing and testing things in my own experience.
I sympathize with the difficulty of conveying such experiential knowledge, but then I think that this is the crux of the matter. This might be a situation where you just can’t effectively convey your epistemic state—virtuous though it may be (or not, I don’t know, but certainly I have no specific reason to believe otherwise)—in a blog post.
Well, to be honest, the horse metaphors/examples/whatever don’t really resonate with me. I’m not sure what to do with them, truth be told. The fact is that people aren’t horses. Dealing with a person—who can think about what you’re doing, and understand your motivations, and modify their own behavior accordingly, and draw on reputation, and prior knowledge, and rumor, and possesses all those wonderful evolved psychological adaptations for dealing with other humans in social situations, etc.—is not like dealing with a horse, or any similar sort of animal. (I mean, if your analogies involved chimpanzees, I’d still be dubious, but less so—but horses…?)
Oh huh, that’s interesting. I was expecting people to resonate less with the horse examples than I do, but it sounds like you don’t find them helpful whatsoever, which I find kind of surprising.
In the specific case of horses, I think my intuition that they can provide helpful info about humans would probably be hard to explain from scratch—it’s based on a lot of small examples of me comparing and testing things in my own experience.
More generally though, I’m curious if you find people talking about our “reptile brain” or “monkey brain” to be similarly useless? I agree with you that chimps are a better approximation of humans than either horses or crocodiles, but “social mammal brain” seems to me to fit naturally between “reptile” and “monkey” in the space of evolutionarily-valid-seeming claims-of-analogy. It’s absolutely true that these analogies are a long way from perfect—a prefrontal cortex changes a huge amount of how we respond to reptilian urges, and language changes a huge amount of how we engage in monkey status games—but that doesn’t seem to me to undercut their usefulness as analogies/inspirations.
(I’ll also note that my previous comment was about a human’s attitude/intention towards a horse, which seems like it *is* relevant to the question in your previous comment about reasons for high/small, but that’s a separate and less fundamental question.)
I do indeed (and in fact I find this verbal/conceptual habit to be rather annoying).
The thing about analogical thinking is that it can be very dangerous—in several ways, but in one particularly insidious one: it’s easy to forget to tie the argument back to the actual thing you’re talking about. In other words, what I often see is that someone will say “ok, now imagine [some analogy]… in this scenario, blah blah… and therefore, blah blah… and so obviously, blah blah…”—and throughout all of this, they’re still talk about the analogy! I read such things, and I think: “ok, yes, now how do all of your claims, arguments, conclusions, etc., look when you translate them back to the real thing that all of this is an analogy for?”
In other words, analogies are good if they’re used as scaffolding, so to speak, to clarify the shape of an argument or a model, to help your interlocutor understand what you’re saying about reality.[1] But you had better actually have a real argument, with claims about real things, etc.! If you just have the analogy, and all your reasoning is in the analogy-world, and all your conclusions are in the analogy-world, then that’s useless at best, and tremendously misleading at worst. Analogical thinking cannot replace reasoning about the real world. If it does that, then it’s detrimental, not helpful.
[1] The proper structure, therefore, goes like this:
“I am making an argument that [insert claim about reality]. As an analogy, consider [analogical scenario]; in that case, we can see that [reasoning in the analogy-world]; and therefore, [conclusion in the analogy-world]. And so in reality: [analogous reasoning in the real world]; and therefore, [conclusion in the real world].”
Separately:
I sympathize with the difficulty of conveying such experiential knowledge, but then I think that this is the crux of the matter. This might be a situation where you just can’t effectively convey your epistemic state—virtuous though it may be (or not, I don’t know, but certainly I have no specific reason to believe otherwise)—in a blog post.