unpolished mclegibilist

[mclegibilist]

The Second Face of Weakness

If the second face of power is “agenda setting” i.e. creating a situation where you don’t even have to use your decision-making power, then the second face of weakness is preemption—looking for decisions that haven’t been explicitly described to you in order to make sure you follow your best guess of what’s already being set as an agenda.

[mclegibilist]

Looking to the New Year

This was a very hard year for me, but I got plenty done. I don’t feel great about it, somehow. A lot of things in my heart are still all a jumbled up mess. But I feel renewed sense of strength the last few days. My understanding of how I want to understand my career has increased and stabilized. For years, actually years, I was basically putting off deciding what I care enough about to make work, because I was so traumatized by trying to make something I dove head-first into viable and not letting go until it had killed all the standards and boundaries I used to at least half-ass.

But I think I have a vision of how to continue, and I think I have a vision I am comfortable failing with. I can’t help but feel a little foolish for all the time I’ve wasted not getting these things done, but it’s hard for me understate how difficult it was getting *anything* done or interacting with my co-workers to the point that I just created an environment where I had to as little as possible...and still managed to get a decent amount done.

So here’s to having wasted plenty of time, gotten a few things done, and being ready to take a big bite out of a new vision.

[mclegibilist]

I am greedy to be understood

I think one of the things that often strikes when I really get to know someone, is that 99% of the time I am significantly more desirous of being understood than they are. For instance, I find people often accept way more coarse grained signals of whether someone understood their point than I do. I know, I sound like a lot of fun to talk to.

In reality, a lot of the time I just try to calibrate how much people understand what I’m saying from their vague answers and streamlined back channel grunts and “uh-huhs”, so I can snipe the right level of explanation for the next thing exactly right. This is where a lot of my energy goes and a lot of the time it’s super dumb, because the other person isn’t paying enough attention or investing enough emotional energy in the conversation, so that even if I do snipe the right level of abstraction and they do get it, it doesn’t lead anywhere or they don’t remember later and it was mostly in vain.

But what it does give is practice. And I have practiced and practiced figuring out how to get the abstractions exactly right for people, which mostly involves figuring out how they think about the abstractions presented...which has meant that I end-up with an obsession with figuring out what other people are trying to say when I want to be heard.

And this is actually the fundamental principle behind generalized reading: any accurate reading, leads to different writing, any successful writing, leads to a different kind of reading. They play off of each other, because each is trying to capture what’s in the other.

[mclegibilist]

What People Are Saying When They Speak

...will be the name of a series I think I want to do on substack. I feel like every time I try to explain what I want out of explanations of language it ends-up sounding like proper formal linguistic semantics, social theory, or just a Dummy’s guide for autists, and honestly it’s actually all three. What I want is an explanation of what language is doing. And language does lots of things, like if you try to figure out what a recipe is doing there’s a lot of understanding of household physics and chemistry that language is showing you how to manipulate. But even in recipes language is doing social stuff. It’s praising certain things and snubbing others with faint praise. It’s telling you about family legacy and establishing cultural legitimacy. It’s telling you who’s talking and why you should trust them. This is the impossible to ignore social aspect of language, and I want to begin to unravel it, in a way I haven’t found a satisfying version of in the places I’ve looked, so I’m going to start.

[mclegibilist]

Generalized Reading #1

A simple example of generalized reading: how people try to control their sneezes when they’re not alone. When we’re with other people we would, of course, rather not sneeze. This can be explained away by saying that we don’t to spread disease, but here’s a more complicated thing: we also try to make our sneezes quieter, even when we know there’s no chance that the company we keep will fail to notice them. This is because, we are aware of the reaction they elicit, e.g. a loud enough sneeze to be “unignorable” will elicit a “bless you”, a laugh, etc. In most cases, we tend to avoid imposing action on our company, and so we minimize our sneezes to avoid these reactions...but even when we know the reactions are coming, we minimize our sneezes (for instance in the volume of our accompanying vocalization) to at least show that we put effort into the ostensible effort of not eliciting a reaction.

[mclegibilist]

Excitement Misuse

I’ve been intermittently depressed for a while, and I have a bad habit: when I find myself excited I throw it at the most awful thing I have to do that feels urgent, in order to get it over with. Sometimes I can get over the hump of the problem with this method, but a lot of the time I can’t, and the result is predictable: I disincentivize myself from being excited and create a kind of “anxiety of responsibility” around excitement.

This is, of course, just an instance of “generalized reading”, the observation that when a signal becomes associated with something, that thing becomes part of the semantic content of the signal. I was teaching myself to handle excitement as the precursor to anxiety. That part is “just” Pavlovian response. The complicated part, is now that I’m stuck with the response, I plan around the language I’ve learned to communicate with my unconscious responses.

[mclegibilist]

The Attention Gap

(source: https://xkcd.com/1612/)

This XKCD comic describes the fluctuating nature of the “attention gap”, i.e., how how bad X is from how you bad X looks: 

(via QuickLatex: https://quicklatex.com/)

This makes the value of the attention gap very easy to think about: a negative value means that people aren’t likely to show you as much attention as you feel you deserve and a positive value means they might show you more.

The fun part is that social games select for techniques, people, etc. who have a positive attention gap, because attention is a powerful mechanism for coordinating other people to work as a group towards your cause.

This is why “think of the children” rhetoric is so powerful: there are so many ways to imagine children might get screwed-over, because our concept of how delicate they are is so broad, that it’s very easy to make a given hypothetical get significantly more attention than it deserves in expectation. It’s also why car crashes don’t get enough attention: we drive so regularly, they feel pretty safe to us in comparison to how often other things are associated with death (e.g. cancer).

The problem is, for most things we don’t really know X_looks and X_is, so we try to infer things backwards from the attention gap itself, which is impossible to do consistently well.

[mclegibilist]

Artifact Analysis #1

discovered at: https://twitter.com/ThanksThoth/status/1475714336148525057?s=20

This is hilarious, and I’m here to tell you why.

Of course one could naively point to the “serious turn” and in the initial reply, and that’s certainly part of the humor. But this chat would be nothing, nothing without the follow-up. Because the follow-up is the “real serious”. A serious answer was given, a piece of one’s soul was bared, and now, where’s the reply? It’s gone, because you punctured the bubble that allowed the previous reaction to happen.

Yes, yes, all of this is true. But there is something both subtler and simpler lying underneath all of this: the idea of a “wrong kind of ice cream.”

If one were to ask the original question-asker what the right kind of ice cream  was they would likely have said “I don’t know, something quite cute? haha” But, in some sense, the point was that they wanted a truthful answer (at the meta-level) but that they would only accept a cute answer at the concrete level. Many such cases, where you ask a question, and the “test” is whether you answer it to please at the meta- or concrete- level, and this acts as a filter.

[mclegibilist]

Probably Obvious #5: Channel Dilution

“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is about how a signal changes meanings when it becomes correlation with something other than the original expectation.

Most humans signals do not stand alone: they operate in channels. Body language is a channel. “Can I be straight with you?” is a channel. Being alone in someone’s office is a channel. When the information in a given channel is not a reliable predictor of the expected effects, two things can happen: the channel can be come reinterpreted if an agent has some guess of what the transformation from current correlations to true correlation is, or the channel can become ignored if the overhead is too high.

Both happen, due to a bunch of factors that aren’t all about accuracy, but the latter is easier to understand: unreliable messengers become ignored.

[mclegibilist]

Probably Obvious #4: Metaphorical Dynamics Sometimes Work and Sometimes Don’t

Why do we have the grain rye? We have it because there was a weed, rye’s ancestor, that looked enough like wheat that it was hard to separate out. We tried and tried, and eventually it become something delicious enough to eat: rye.

There’s another way this could have worked. Rye could have been super inedible, no matter what we did to it, be impossible to filter out with the technology of the time, and caused significant starvation.

Metaphors are like this: they can go eitherway. The dynamics that connect a given object to metaphorical dynamics may carry on their resemblance past the metaphor, or they may just be skin deep. We may not need an airplane to flap its wings, but we might need to understand humans better to make a reasonable AI dialogue agent. As usual, the conversation is ruled by the abuse of strawmen.

For this subject, I’ll tell you what I think, which is what I mostly always think: we need better vocabulary. Current dialogue agents are limited by the metaphors we use to describe them, precisely because we can’t find a metaphor that works enough to guide us.

[mclegibilist]

Neuralink Word Processors

Long, long ago, when I couldn’t touch type, I wanted to be able to type with my mind. Not have the computer tell me anything I didn’t already know, but just get the damn thing on the page. And frankly, that would still increase my productivity a lot. I’m a relatively slow typer, and that’s already a pain. I have RSI, and I’m worried I’m killing my hand. But also, typing across documents and doing funny things I could immediately imagine exactly takes time as I get my hands to do them and make mistakes. I’m sure there would be plenty of mistakes with a neuralinterface, but I doubt it would be slower once it’s optimized, so I look forward to writing on tumblr over neuralink in exchange for Elon Musk directly reading my mind.

[mclegibilist]

Extrapolation Between Usage and Context

I have heard and used the term “loose cannon” for years.

But it was only upon seeing this image of what a loose cannon might do, that I understood the origin of the phrase:

(from The Return of the Obra Dinn, I promise this is not a spoiler)

What’s interesting is this image is

(a) static and unmoving, despite implying motion and giving me knowledge of a term referring to a process that implies motion

(b) a very coarse, metaphorical representation of a situation. It’s not a picture, and it’s not an altered version of a picture. It’s a very stylized rendering of objects I understand because of the context of the game.

And yet, from seeing this, my mind suddenly understood the implied motion of loose cannon. I derived it from the fact that this man is being crushed by a loose cannon, and it is this event I can understand, and which then interfaces with the vocabulary in my mind that needs updating.

[mclegibilist]

What Science Has Become #1

It’s an obvious point, but the weirdest thing about capital-S Science in the mind of the public today is that it serves as a foundational epistemology. We could sit here and argue all day about what science is in some meaningful sense, but I won’t. Just take a look at one of the most popular recent exchanges about it where Science is defined so broadly as to basically stretch over “anything that you could get other people to believe on more than the authority of your name”.

So, forget it.

The point is that the aesthetic of Science is what now makes something believable. First, there are citations. Then there are statistics. And further down still, there are names which make distinctions that are slightly counter-intuitive and repurpose colloquial vocabulary to make people think they have a handle on them, but give you space for correcting them at any moment.

Scientific style isn’t just how you sound smart it’s how you sound legitimate at all, because it’s become the lingua franca of people trying to compete for epistemological clout as it relates to their public sphere of choice.

[mclegibilist]

Scientific Communication #1

In brief, “functional pragmatism” means “Defining communication based on use, where ‘use’ is broadly construed as ‘anything that gets anything done’ so that understanding meaning is just about understanding the expectations people implicitly build-up for their utterances.”

Arguing with my colleagues, they mostly tell me that if I have any insights in this case, that they should be immediately operationalizable. Since my focus is so thoroughly on use, anything I understand about language that is not already understood should be provable through its use in some language-involved system.

I disagree on what, I have to say, seems like a pretty basic principle: a lot of theories need to be nailed down in certain areas before they can be relied on in any meaningful sense. This reveals the criticism as what it really is: an implied “why should I waste my time on theories we don’t know will pan out?”

This, I feel, is the sad logical-end of overly hypothesis-based (as opposed to exploratory) science. In the intense competition of modern science, the game is to surprise your friends and grant-granters with important hypotheses you proved that everyone references. This encourages quick turn-over, and not straying too far from what the current language of a field can express...and I fear even in the places where we understand things the least (i.e. language) people are locked in enough to the local game of out-competing their peers they don’t see that they can’t express the hypotheses that would actually matter.

[mclegibilist]

Reading “The Innocence of Father Brown” #4

I recently finished The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton. It was quite good, and I have a lot to say about it some other time, but it made me think of something I feel is often misunderstood: being clever is badly represented by being able to undo what someone else has constructed to be hard to backwards engineer.

This is the reason I find myself often disliking mystery novels. There is nothing I admire more than real life detective work, whatever subject it might be approaching: the art of tracking down signals, manmade or otherwise, is the operationalization of curiosity, and I love it. But the mysteries presented in fiction often come down to:

(1) the author thought of a funny situation that they think could be presented as appearing to be one thing, while really being another

(2) they attempt to introduce the situation incrementally to support the superficial view of the scenario, while creating hints that will make it clear what the real situation was in retrospect once the reader has full knowledge

(3) they fill out anything that feels thin after this process is done

This tends to miss the two things that are corner stones of cleverness:

(a) the ability to look for signals that weren’t intended. authors can try to encode this, but they usually suck at backwards engineering the reality of the situation.

(b) it tends to miss the fact that what’s so interesting about being clever in real life, is that there’s no “one thing” to realize. it’s all kind of a murky, diffuse mess and the cleverness is in finding a solid thread where everything is mostly malleable.

G. K. Chesterton, despite his other merits, seems to not realize this at all, and it makes me doubt how much he really has to say about society that I can believe.

[mclegibilist]

Two Kinds of First Principles

Many things are called “first principles”. There are two very common ones that are both useful, but have become confounded.

(1) First principles as analogous to axiomatic thinking. This is when you try to find things you’re really sure you believe in, then derive knowledge you think logically follows from that.

(2) First principles as analogous to an absence of underlying theory. This is when you look at a new situation/problem/idea/field/etc. and then say “If I think X explains Y, what else has to be the case?” and then either reject X and find an explanation, or figure out all the Y’s you can find. Then continue recursively.

These are very related: they both rely on some notion of “statements and implications I am as confident in as I reasonably can be about anything, used to outline problems and solutions”. The difference is that (1) is inductive and makes you try to derive knowledge directly from this set while (2) is broadly deductive and makes you cut away as many possible hypotheses as you can with knowledge already in your possession.

[mclegibilist]

I reject the notion that, because once I have undergone a change I would like it, I should undergo that change. I reject the notion that I am not allowed to define the self against my “best interests” or whatever stupid pseudo-measurable is popular that die. It seems the heart of Western sentiment has been leaning ever more towards “choosing to be me because I chose it, damn it” and I don’t disapprove, though I am at odds with most of the conventional wisdom that presents itself as a corollary. It is easy to make fun of people who choose to be miserable under the auspices of such freedom, and quite true that many do. I do not see this as a problem, or rather, I only see it as a personal problem. We may choose to be miserable if that is the price for choosing at all, because I don’t believe in the easy functional equivalence the idea of “utils” tends to bring forth. If you want to deal in utils you really have to face how variable pricing is and, frankly, I don’t think we have the tools, vocabulary, or data to do so.