LessWrong Thursday: Fights over Words

(LessWrong Toronto has a weekly Tuesday meeting - check out our meetup page!  Because it generally takes me two days to do up a post, it's LessWrong Thursday!)

This week, we discussed Lukeprog's article "Pluralistic Moral Reductionism" - which is philosophical fancy-talk for the understanding that when people talk about moral concepts like "good" or "right" they define those terms differently ("pluralism"), and may smuggle in their own preferences and perspectives in the meanings of the words themselves, so it's really important to explicitly define your words ("reductionism").

Folks had lots of interesting stuff to say, as always - one thing we discussed that stuck out to me was when the conversation turned to gay marriage.  One of our members observed that in discussing the issue with folks in the "anti-" camp, the thing that most came up was strong reservations about changing the definition of "marriage" - which they saw as having a long history, being the traditional mating system of their ancestors.  What they objected to, it seems, is not being inclusive of gay people, but with the purity of the word.

This is a "fight about words" in a different sense than that which arises over the definition of "sound" in the tree falling in a forest problem.  This is a word overstuffed with meaning and nobility, which encapsulates aspects of civilization, institution and religion, and is tied strongly to our future as well as our past.

Even though I am very pro marriage equality, I can identify with this sentiment.  Getting married and having kids in a more or less traditional manner has been one of the great boons of my life.  My intuitions on this are not structured in such a way as to be exclusionary, but I can understand how one might feel changing a concept which holds a central place in one's life as a violation.

As it happens, I believe marriage is going to drastically change in structure in the coming decades due to various social convulsions we're experiencing now around sexual politics and relationships, and in terms of the past, the meaning & structure of marriage is nowhere near as stable as the tradcons think it was.  That, and the simply awful outcomes for gay people if we don't update our institutions to address their needs means marriage equality wins.

Impulse

...as I reach for the pack of large (about four inches in diameter, apiece) cookies, something happens in my forebrain, cascades through my nervous system to my muscles, resists the physical momentum of my arm, and stops my hand.  I grab a piece of fruit instead.

An impulse, in physics, is something that changes the momentum of an object (like my muscles acting on my arm and hand).

In signal processing, an impulse is an impossibly narrow peak.

In audio (and signal processing in general), we have a tool called a low-pass filter, which attenuates out high frequency information and leaves low frequency information alone.  In other words, it smooths out the wrinkley bits of a signal.

This is the schematic for the simplest version of a low pass filter, called an RC network, because it consists of a resistor and a capacitor.  A capacitor is is essentially two metal plates, separated by a bit of air - when you put it in a circuit, the plates have to "charge up" before current will jump across the air gap, so a capacitor has an impedance which is inversely proportional to the freqency (or angular momentum, or velocity) of the current.

Higher frequencies will tend to "drain" into the capacitor (indicated by "C"), instead of being applied across the load "VC."  The more "impulse-like" parts of the signal are drawn off from the smoother parts.

In psychology, an impulse is a sudden wish or urge.

A test for impulsivity (among other things) in children is the Marshmellow Test - in which a marshmellow is placed in front of the child, and they are told they can earn a second marshmellow if they can refrain from eating the first for fifteen minutes or so.  Here's my oldest daughter, Anika, taking the Marshmellow Test (ya, I'm mean)...

At fifteen minutes, it's a bit long and boring, but you can watch how Anika copes with this challenge, highlights at 1:30, 2:20, 3:40, 7:30, 8:00 & 13:00.

She looks away, she distracts herself, she whines and cries, she hides under the table, &etc.

In the same way a capacitor shunts off noisy impulses to smooth out a signal, Anika is shunting off the emotional energy involved in resisting that oh so tempting marshmellow into these behavioural outbursts.  Impuse control (in psychology) is like a high pass filter (in signal processing).

This is strictly a metaphor - I would be very surprised if it correlated with anything which actually went on in a human brain.

The Solution of my Problems

"An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkely, took a seminar in metaphor from one of us.  Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor.  The expression was "the solution of my problems" - which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipatitating out others.  He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind.  And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful.  It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all.  All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form.  The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without making another one precipitate out.  And since you do not have complete control over what goes into the solution, you are constatly finding old and new problems precipitating out and present problems dissolving, partly because of your efforts and partly despite anything you do.

The CHEMICAL metaphor gives us a new view of human problems.  It is appropriate to the experience of finding that problems which we once thought were "solved" turn up again and again.  The CHEMICAL metaphor says that problems are not the kind of things that can be made to disappear forever.  To treat them as things that can be "solved" once and for all is pointless.  To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would be to accept it as a fact that no problem ever disappears forever.  Rather than direct your energies toward solving your problems once and for all, you would direct your energies toward finding out what catalysts will dissolve your most pressing problems for the longest time without precipitating out worse onces.  The re-appearance of a problem is viewed as a natural occurrence rather than a failure on your part to find "the right way to solve it."

George Lakeoff & Mark Johnsen

Metaphors We Live By

Traditionally, we model problems and solutions in a strictly linear relationship:  I desire some outcome, so I perform actions x, y & z to achieve it.  The weakness of the linear model, which is elegantly accounted for in the chemical metaphor, are unintended consequences and trade-offs.

It's not an especially happy perspective, but if you take the view that life is a long series of problems, it's easy to see how problems and solutions connect with each other - we get into romantic relationships to solve the problem of loneliness, but this introduces the new problem of having to live with someone who's preferences conflict with ours, so we have to negotiate that.  Then we have too many quarrels and break up, and now we're back to the problem of loneliness.  &etc.

The chemical metaphor captures offers a more realistic, anticipatory model for how solutions are implemented in reality - our actions (getting into a relationship) are going to have unintended consequences (fighting), which will involve making trade-offs (compromising on our preferences to keep both partners happy).

In a sense, the biggest problem of our lives is acquiring and maintaining happiness.

You can kind of see this everywhere - computers are probably the best example of a solution to a problem (that we didn't know we had...) with massive unintended consequences and trade-offs entailed.

Another example is cars - the biggest unintended consequence is traffic accidents.  A solution - the self-driving car - is in the works.  How will self-driving cars entirely restructure the way we do transportation?  An interesting exercise is to write down everything you can think of.  Then, read the article Forbes recently published on the subject - you'll probably be surprised.  Now think of the potential for unintended consequences...

Toilet Training & Ego Depletion

I noticed, over the weekend, the my youngest daughter was much more melt-down prone.  Like, ridiculously more, I'd say by a factor or two or three times.  And not over big things, like having to miss a birthday party or having to leave the park ("big" accounting for what's considered big from a kid's perspective), but over tiny, insignificant things.

I remembered similar behaviour from my older daughter, and the catalyst in both cases seemed to be that they were learning how to use the bathroom.

I first learned of the concept of ego depletion in Daniel Kahneman's oft-referenced book "Thinking Fast & Slow."  It's a very simple, very powerful metaphor - you have a finite amount of willpower to spend on paying close attention to, and changing your habits, and the more you spend, the more you tend to revert back to your baseline, thoughtless behaviours.  It's easy to see how this idea plays into all sorts of things like diet & exercise, quitting smoking, akrasia, &etc.

Children are in a constant state of ego depletion - their baseline behaviours are just awful.  If they want something, their default method of getting it is to yell an impolite demand (at least, this seems to characterize my kids - YMMV).  You can train them to suppress this behaviour, but it takes constant correction and a lot of effort on their part.

It's pretty easy to see toilet training as a huge drain on the ego resevoir - constantly self-monitoring your bowels and changing the habit of just peeing wherever you stand and continuing on with your day must just take a huge amount of effort.  This will tend to make children melt-down prone.

In terms of parenting-style, I'm not entirely certain how to best incorporate this model.  On the one hand, I have an intuition that I should add a little more "compassionate dad" and dial-down on "dad the hard-ass," to help deal with the fact that hard work is being done to meet a new challenge.  On the other hand, ego depletion is a thing we will all have to deal with as adults, it's a fully-generalizable skill, and it's something that may have serious long-term benefits for a little short-term pain now.

The good news is, she stayed dry the entire weekend.  Go Lilah!