I'm almost done Metaphors We Live By. Lakeoff & Johnson spend the last third or so of the book arguing against the objective/subjective worldviews, in favour of a more inclusive Experientialist coneptualization, which, in summary, suggests that objective concerns of figuring out what the world is really like, consistent applications of fairness, &etc. have to share space with the fact that human understanding is contingent on our intuitive faculty, which operates at a basic level on a web of meaning which is often formed of loose, surface-level similarities between foundational concepts.
Whew.
Anyway, what it made me think is that science often functions as a metaphor destroyer.
I came to think of the use to which language could be put as a spectrum, with poetry on one end and science on the other.
Poetry is applied language sloppiness - loose associations between concepts with fuzzy boundaries to form surprising juxtapositions. A good poem should feel like an amorphous mass of meaning which produces an emotional response.
Science is applied language precision - pinpoint, strictly exclusionary concepts with absolutely no definitional overlap and extremely focused meanings. And the logical endpoint for progressively destroying ambiguity in language is the use of mathematics.
Poetry lives in intuition, but science allows you to transcend intuition, which is both a strength and a weakness, in terms of it's role in understanding. For example, I've never read an attempt at communicating an intuitive grasp of quantum psychics that didn't serve to deepen my confusion. This because an analogy relies on the trick of finding similarities between two concepts, in order to convey an experience the reader has never had, in terms of an experience the reader has had, and leveraging that similarity into communicating the intuition. You can even "build" an unfamiliar concept out of the building blocks of other concepts, if you careful exclude those facets of meaning which aren't relevant.
The thing about quantum psychics is, it's so foreign to our experience as macro-level animals that there's simply no conceptual building blocks available, except the math.
Wednesday 26 June 2013
Tuesday 25 June 2013
LessWrong: The burden of existential risk
The official topic last week was Existential Risk (that set of things that could kill all humanity: environmental degradation, new & exciting diseases, unfriendly artificial intelligence, nanotechnology "grey goo", &etc.), but our actual discussion was kind of all over the place.
How I've come to see the psychological toll of thinking about existential risk is this: we both have an inflated sense of our own responsibility for doing something, and a strong sense that we lack any agency whatsoever, because the problem is so huge and daunting. It's the type of problem people can only solve in large groups, where all the individuals are pulling in the same direction towards the goal. We feel the fear driving us to get everyone on board, but it's hard to convince people to care about something highly abstract and far-feeling. Environmentalism is an exception to this, because we can see, more or less directly, the effects of environmental degradation, and because we have easy-to-process metaphors (everyone understands and dirty house or a dirty street, and can scale that up in their minds to a dirty world).
I humbly suggest: in order to be an effective agent of change on such a big problem, you first have to learn how to live with the problem in a healthy, more-or-less self-interested way. And the way to do this, counter-intuitively, is to work on all the little problems in your life.
The reason this works is because fixing little problems gives us back our sense of agency in our lives. And it's subjectively true: completing a task that we've procrastinated on for too long feels very energizing.
Do enough of this, and the big, scary problem is still a big, scary problem, but now we are approaching it from a frame of being an active participant - this is called "being in a higher energy set".
The idea of an energy set is from Athol Kay's new book, The Mindful Attraction Plan. He doesn't address existential risk specifically, but gives a lot of very practical advice to approaching Big Life Problems like unemployment, bad relationships, &etc.
A quote from the book:
"The universe, or at the very least our planet, is a giant energy set. You may be simply one tiny speck in a sea of humanity, but your best actions can reverberate out into the lives of others. What you send out comes back eventually. While I don't believe in prayers magically supplying you with things you need, I do have a low-key faith in the universe being one giant reflective field of intention."
How I've come to see the psychological toll of thinking about existential risk is this: we both have an inflated sense of our own responsibility for doing something, and a strong sense that we lack any agency whatsoever, because the problem is so huge and daunting. It's the type of problem people can only solve in large groups, where all the individuals are pulling in the same direction towards the goal. We feel the fear driving us to get everyone on board, but it's hard to convince people to care about something highly abstract and far-feeling. Environmentalism is an exception to this, because we can see, more or less directly, the effects of environmental degradation, and because we have easy-to-process metaphors (everyone understands and dirty house or a dirty street, and can scale that up in their minds to a dirty world).
I humbly suggest: in order to be an effective agent of change on such a big problem, you first have to learn how to live with the problem in a healthy, more-or-less self-interested way. And the way to do this, counter-intuitively, is to work on all the little problems in your life.
The reason this works is because fixing little problems gives us back our sense of agency in our lives. And it's subjectively true: completing a task that we've procrastinated on for too long feels very energizing.
Do enough of this, and the big, scary problem is still a big, scary problem, but now we are approaching it from a frame of being an active participant - this is called "being in a higher energy set".
The idea of an energy set is from Athol Kay's new book, The Mindful Attraction Plan. He doesn't address existential risk specifically, but gives a lot of very practical advice to approaching Big Life Problems like unemployment, bad relationships, &etc.
A quote from the book:
"The universe, or at the very least our planet, is a giant energy set. You may be simply one tiny speck in a sea of humanity, but your best actions can reverberate out into the lives of others. What you send out comes back eventually. While I don't believe in prayers magically supplying you with things you need, I do have a low-key faith in the universe being one giant reflective field of intention."
Tuesday 18 June 2013
Shame
Another thing we talked about at LessWrong on Tuesday (this is many Tuesday's ago, as I've been extremely busy and haven't been able to put time in here) was the difference between shamae and guilt. As I recall we couldn't quite reach consensus - at least one person thought there was no real distinction, some thought shame and guilt were feelings for processing the transgression group norms vs. self-norms.
Youtube blogger Typhon Blue has an interesting treatment of shame as part of her "Threat Narratives" series. I'll paraphrase her: Shame is a way of dealing with group norms. When an individual is in some way violating these norms, the group will say something like: "We value you intrinsically, but this behaviour is toxic and unacceptable. Please go off and deal with your shit, and come back when you feel you can start to work for the good of the group again."
At the meeting, some of us agreed that shame or guilt was characterized by a slightly uncomfortable feeling in your stomach or gut. And you can see above the metaphors for toxicity, vomiting and evacuation - a person is expelled (vomited) from the group, so they can work out whatever is causing their bad behaviour - which will also involve some kind of expulsion in the psychological sense.
As moral psychologists (that is, psychologists who study morality, not psychologists who are moral) like Jonathan Haidt have pointed out, this metaphor of toxicity and expulsion is suspiciously prevalent when we discuss issues of group norms - for example, objects can become "contaminated" by the moral actions of people who owned or handled them - this is, I suspect, is why so many people who aren't Neo-Nazis collect Nazi memorabilia. It's also why I wouldn't show up to work sporting a tiny moustache (the only time I've seen such a moustache on a man, it was on a member of the punk band the Murder Junkies, and he was *obviously* being provocative).
Evolution uses existing adaptations for multiple purposes when it can, and I suspect this is what's going on here. Shame and morality have appeared just recently, and I think they have co-opted our existing adaptations that deal with illness, or rotten or contaminated food, to deal with behaviours which violate group norms, or are in some sense maladaptive.
(Edit - I just came across this, from blogger Ricky Raw of therawness.com: "If a guilty person did something wrong and no one else knew, they would still feel bad, because even though their image is still intact, it’s their actions and the content of their character that matters to them. If a shame-prone person did something wrong and no one else knew, they would not feel bad because as long as their image is fine, everything else is fine, regardless of whether their actions are morally right or wrong. To a shame-prone person, actions are only “right” or “wrong” to the extent that they damage his or her reputation or image, regardless of the actual intent and impact of the actions. To a shame-prone person, actions only matter when they damage the image, cause feelings of exposure and embarrassment, and reveal that they are flawed to their core, making them feel like frauds.")
Youtube blogger Typhon Blue has an interesting treatment of shame as part of her "Threat Narratives" series. I'll paraphrase her: Shame is a way of dealing with group norms. When an individual is in some way violating these norms, the group will say something like: "We value you intrinsically, but this behaviour is toxic and unacceptable. Please go off and deal with your shit, and come back when you feel you can start to work for the good of the group again."
At the meeting, some of us agreed that shame or guilt was characterized by a slightly uncomfortable feeling in your stomach or gut. And you can see above the metaphors for toxicity, vomiting and evacuation - a person is expelled (vomited) from the group, so they can work out whatever is causing their bad behaviour - which will also involve some kind of expulsion in the psychological sense.
As moral psychologists (that is, psychologists who study morality, not psychologists who are moral) like Jonathan Haidt have pointed out, this metaphor of toxicity and expulsion is suspiciously prevalent when we discuss issues of group norms - for example, objects can become "contaminated" by the moral actions of people who owned or handled them - this is, I suspect, is why so many people who aren't Neo-Nazis collect Nazi memorabilia. It's also why I wouldn't show up to work sporting a tiny moustache (the only time I've seen such a moustache on a man, it was on a member of the punk band the Murder Junkies, and he was *obviously* being provocative).
Evolution uses existing adaptations for multiple purposes when it can, and I suspect this is what's going on here. Shame and morality have appeared just recently, and I think they have co-opted our existing adaptations that deal with illness, or rotten or contaminated food, to deal with behaviours which violate group norms, or are in some sense maladaptive.
(Edit - I just came across this, from blogger Ricky Raw of therawness.com: "If a guilty person did something wrong and no one else knew, they would still feel bad, because even though their image is still intact, it’s their actions and the content of their character that matters to them. If a shame-prone person did something wrong and no one else knew, they would not feel bad because as long as their image is fine, everything else is fine, regardless of whether their actions are morally right or wrong. To a shame-prone person, actions are only “right” or “wrong” to the extent that they damage his or her reputation or image, regardless of the actual intent and impact of the actions. To a shame-prone person, actions only matter when they damage the image, cause feelings of exposure and embarrassment, and reveal that they are flawed to their core, making them feel like frauds.")
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