Mar 12, 2023ยทedited Mar 12, 2023Liked by Mills, ๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ฑ๐ฏ๐ฌ๐ซ๐ข๐ฐ๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ฃ ๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ๐
thus: we are dependent on the many slightly-deranged people who can again and again conjure confidence for their unsystematic and questionably-rational ideas and push them out into the world despite their fragility
Mar 11, 2023Liked by Mills, ๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ฑ๐ฏ๐ฌ๐ซ๐ข๐ฐ๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ฃ ๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ๐
This is lit, certainly.
An experience I had while reading was that I nodded along to your proposed outline, thinking to myself how much Iโd like to read that piece. Then, when you blew up your own idea, I suddenly felt foolish for thinking it was good. That is, you were persuasive enough to convince me of both sides. But ... I still think the original outline is GOOD and is a post you should write! Does that make me foolish for thinking so, or you foolish for not writing it?
I feel like this exactly illustrates your point: rationalism (and especially rationalism on the Internet) has the ability to knock our collective confidence in our own thoughts so much that it leaves the great majority in paralysis and unable to express them at all.
This is very obviously bad and so I guess Iโm just here to thank your ego, I guess, for posting it anyway. And I eagerly await the post from the outline, of course.
Mar 14, 2023Liked by Mills, ๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ฑ๐ฏ๐ฌ๐ซ๐ข๐ฐ๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ฃ ๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ๐
What a cool piece. I have thoughts.
This is to say I love your ideas, and how you write about them. But I'm too concrete to be able to contribute to the idea space in the traditional way.
That doesn't mean that Karl Popper and his ideas aren't interesting or compelling, they are. But, I donโt find his ideas quite as actionable as I like. It means I'll look for parallels, and it means that I'll look for context. In Popper's case, that context was the emergence of quantum physics. He was learning about the physical world at a time when physics itself was being rewritten. But, never do I find a way to actually test his ideas. It's because I'm not smart enough to figure out how to model them, or make them actionable.
I sort of feel as though you sense the same thing happening again.
Maybe we live in a parallel time. We are living in an age where the fundamental concept of information, something I've learned how write equations to describe, equations with concepts like bandwidth, signal, noise, rate and bit, that are very precise, are being scaled to magnificent complexity. Honestly, it is emotionally overwhelming.
On the other hand, I can think of examples in cases that can partially address some questions. But, I have also started to be circumspect about examples, so forgive me the indulgence.
Your question above about the behavior of a population learning about the behavior of a population is a great one, and there is an example to observe. Wall street traders are a group, when someone figures out what the group of traders in aggregate are doing, and capitalizes on it, others in the group interested in that kind of thing, copy the trend and weaken it (markets are short term zero sum). Some try to find out how to bet against it. While others ignore it, sometimes to their own peril. And personally, I don't worry too much about it because, in general, markets are somewhat constrained by reality. When they're not, when traders figure out how to do something like create a side market that affects the capitalization of the market, like a credit default swap, then I worry. In the 1930's it was trading on margin that got us. The 2000 crash was a classic bubble, the kind of behavior caused by fear of missing out. Boom-bust cycles dominated the capital markets in the the late 19th century, I think until the first world war.
In general though, the question is about feedback. Most sapiens don't have a super strong grasp about how feedback systems behave. Even those who do understand feedback might lose sight of things where the feedback and signals are multi-dimensional. Then, there are the effects of noise and errors, which is where you start your piece, young adults being subject to an unrealistic inputs. Like any good system element, they try to adjust to accommodate the input.
One of the problems with feedback systems is the polarity, positive feedback can cause instability if it is not contained in a system with greater negative feedback. And in most cases, delays and lags in the system, which affect the time varying "polarity" are key factors, in fact, the other big knob besides gain and polarity, used to tune a feedback system. A final and also large factor is a constraint/s.
As a parent of young adults, I do find the kinds of content on the web and through the ubiquitous apps, less than lovely, and I agree it makes us prone to unrealistic comparisons. But lately, I've been less concerned about the kinds of expectations the web/internet/social media create, and find myself more concerned about the sources of noise and error in our culture. In addition to widely discussed sources of misleading information, I was recently reminded of a source of noise and error in the embodiment of talk radio. To most people, this ubiquitous pass over space on the radio dial is uninteresting if it's even encountered. In our marketplace of ideas, noise and errors are not great things. A little bit of noise might help to make sure that the systems present to correct it are able to do that but large erroneous signals are hard to correct.
One feature of the discussion above is, for a given system with defined functional elements with inputs, outputs and network interconnections, a calculable response is generally possible. Remarkably complex behavior is possible for systems with a modest number of elements - see the game of lifeโฆ Still, the thing reads a little like philosophy.
A number of issues make human systems intractable, presently. First and foremost, the internal โcalculationsโ we do as elements in the system. Second, how we are actually interconnected is not well defined and is time varying. We also receive inputs from aggregated sources in groups. Finally, we have inputs from the environment.
The Dominion/Fox news case has given us a great example of the internal calculations inside semi-isolated elements in the greater social mesh.
Advertisers, media companies, food companies and many others have statistical models based on sub-groups to estimate the response to a larger campaign. So, we are already using techniques to model the response of the larger system.
Here I need to hand the argument to Heather Havrilesky who has made a case that human emotion is still the largest most important part in any of these kinds of systems. Personally, I feel that science, one starting to model human emotion is also developing strength. And, the models of emotion I sense have the strongest long term potential, involve feedback.
> You donโt need huge, bulging muscles to learn martial arts
lol, anyway
> Within martial arts schools, techniques of muscle have been refined and elaborated over generations. Techniques of rationality are harder to pass on, even to the most willing student.
Ok so it's like martial arts: a pursuit of a discipline with a special real world relevance.
The only problem is that also martial arts seem to be pretty fake? And maybe in a pretty similar way? I'm mostly getting this from this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA
This theory goes that a lot of what passes for martial arts is people LARPing hand to hand combat. When revered masters of many traditions meet people who actually fight and don't have to follow their rules, they get the shit kicked out of them. Being really really good at hand to hand combat is already a very teenage boy idea of what it means to be formidable, but if it also utterly fails on those terms, that's very funny.
When you talk about your ideas getting "absolutely demolished" by the scary rationalists it makes me wonder what kind of demolition we are talking here. Are they getting knocked out, or are they just losing the equivalent of a karate chop contest..
I guess this all just dancing around the question: what are we doing here? What are all these ideas and stories and graphs and arguments *for*? I think there are some potential good answers for this that don't involve escaping critique from imagined rationalists :)
Aug 25, 2023Liked by Mills, ๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ฑ๐ฏ๐ฌ๐ซ๐ข๐ฐ๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ฃ ๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ๐
Listen: U THINK, Therefore U WRITE. Rationalism and Art kan subsist 2getha. How do we know?? The Father of RATIONALISM, RENE DESCARTES combined GEOMETRY and ALEGEBRA. ART & MATH!! Say What?? (Thereby causing generations of students to FLUNK....but thats another thought for another day). Youth-Obsessed kulture seems 2 B driven by GREED n AMBITION rather than any form of RATIONAL thought (re: a nod to your point about CELEBS). In short: Artists have to learn to fuse the two and be RATIONAL in your approach to Ya ART butt be IRRATIONAL in the EXECUTION of it.
Mar 12, 2023ยทedited Mar 12, 2023Liked by Mills, ๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ฑ๐ฏ๐ฌ๐ซ๐ข๐ฐ๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ฃ ๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ๐
Reading this made me think of a part of this book that is totally worth it tho quite pop - never split the difference (by a former FBI negotiator on negotiating) - about how humans are not... rational. So rational solutions don't work well in irrational systems such as 1:1 human dynamics.
This whole lil section is worth reading, but I'll try to excerpt it: https://subwayreads.org/book/never-split-the-difference/. He essentially goes to Harvard and kicks everyone's ass at negotiating who has been studying it and creating rational theories about it since the nixon administration, and reflects on why that happened --
For more than three decades, Harvard had been the world epicenter of negotiating theory and practice. All I knew about the techniques we used at the FBI was that they worked. In the twenty years I spent at the Bureau weโd designed a system that had successfully resolved almost every kidnapping we applied it to. But we didnโt have grand theories.
...
In my short stay [in Harvard Law Schoolโs Winter Negotiation Course] I realized that without a deep understanding of human psychology, without the acceptance that we are all crazy, irrational, impulsive, emotionally driven animals, all the raw intelligence and mathematical logic in the world is little help in the fraught, shifting interplay of two people negotiating.
Yes, perhaps we are the only animal that hagglesโa monkey does not exchange a portion of his banana for anotherโs nutsโbut no matter how we dress up our negotiations in mathematical theories, we are always an animal, always acting and reacting first and foremost from our deeply held but mostly invisible and inchoate fears, needs, perceptions, and desires.
Thatโs not how these folks at Harvard learned it, though. Their theories and techniques all had to do with intellectual power, logic, authoritative acronyms like BATNA and ZOPA, rational notions of value, and a moral concept of what was fair and what was not.
And built on top of this false edifice of rationality was, of course, process. They had a script to follow, a predetermined sequence of actions, offers, and counteroffers designed in a specific order to bring about a particular outcome. It was as if they were dealing with a robot, that if you did a, b, c, and d in a certain fixed order, you would get x. But in the real world negotiation is far too unpredictable and complex for that. You may have to do a then d, and then maybe q.
Mar 12, 2023Liked by Mills, ๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ฑ๐ฏ๐ฌ๐ซ๐ข๐ฐ๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ฃ ๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ๐
This is spot on. My need to ration is often at odds with my desire to imagine. The former somehow seems like the more prestigious way to write, but I think the latter is the more important reason to write!
Sep 13, 2023Liked by Mills, ๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ฑ๐ฏ๐ฌ๐ซ๐ข๐ฐ๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ฃ ๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ๐
Such good Qs!! I think โmaybeโ is smart to guide a personโs insights but I like to think about subjectivity as a kind of truth because itโs true for that person. I think weโre each living a unique reality. Some people are literally living in a dystopia while others are living in luxury. We need the subjective to explain parts of our shared reality that rationality canโt reach. We canโt grow, learn, explore or change without the subjective. This is why I always think nonfiction, memoirs and essays are so valuable because itโs a form that allows us to question the abstract experiences that are hard to qualify. (Assuming the writer is trustworthy, willing to tell a story thatโs true to them haha and doesnโt have an ulterior motive to manipulate) and then you can reach people who have the same feelings but havenโt been able to put it into words. The first part of your essay did that to me! โค๏ธโ๐ฅโค๏ธโ๐ฅโค๏ธโ๐ฅ
Aug 14, 2023Liked by Mills, ๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ฑ๐ฏ๐ฌ๐ซ๐ข๐ฐ๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ฃ ๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ๐
I feel your dilemma more than I can say. On the top of everything, I have a cultural layer as well. Being Hungarian, I have a tendency of expressing myself with a directness that is often perceived as rigidly categorical. I have written several posts to make the case for the opposite, but that does not help with what is - mostly - style.
As for your question, the youth obsession is not a new phenomenon. Arguably, it started with "The Sorrows of Young Werther" which was published in 1774.
Still, I see what you mean, but I will have to think about it....
May 5, 2023Liked by Mills, ๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ฑ๐ฏ๐ฌ๐ซ๐ข๐ฐ๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ฃ ๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ๐
I really appreciate the nuance of this piece. I also find your acknowledgment of the need for epistemic humility incredible valuable. And I enjoyed how you wrapped it by pointing out that sometimes we canโt know for sure and so we just have to go for it. (Apologies if my paraphrase is too far off the mark). Thank you
Mar 12, 2023Liked by Mills, ๐๐ฏ๐ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ฑ๐ฏ๐ฌ๐ซ๐ข๐ฐ๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ฃ ๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ๐
โTo the extent that Western culture has become youth culture, Western culture valorizes what seems good to the young. The paths society consecrates as desirable โthe lowest form of consecration, but all we have leftโ are those paths which appeal to the young.โ
This just came across my timeline for some reason. Great read! This particular topic of social media, phones and depression was kinda trending around then, I think? Might have been due to some research? I dunno.
A couple of thoughts/questions. Are rationalist a prominent influence in any area? I think they are in the philosophy of science, but I don't know Popper well or Deutsch at all- legit curious!
Also, sometimes I think about the qualitative data being amassed by Substack. Could be a pretty valuable source for behavioral analysis. What I am asking is--how are you manipulating my behavior here and why? Haha. Cheers.
thus: we are dependent on the many slightly-deranged people who can again and again conjure confidence for their unsystematic and questionably-rational ideas and push them out into the world despite their fragility
just @ me next time
This is lit, certainly.
An experience I had while reading was that I nodded along to your proposed outline, thinking to myself how much Iโd like to read that piece. Then, when you blew up your own idea, I suddenly felt foolish for thinking it was good. That is, you were persuasive enough to convince me of both sides. But ... I still think the original outline is GOOD and is a post you should write! Does that make me foolish for thinking so, or you foolish for not writing it?
I feel like this exactly illustrates your point: rationalism (and especially rationalism on the Internet) has the ability to knock our collective confidence in our own thoughts so much that it leaves the great majority in paralysis and unable to express them at all.
This is very obviously bad and so I guess Iโm just here to thank your ego, I guess, for posting it anyway. And I eagerly await the post from the outline, of course.
What a cool piece. I have thoughts.
This is to say I love your ideas, and how you write about them. But I'm too concrete to be able to contribute to the idea space in the traditional way.
That doesn't mean that Karl Popper and his ideas aren't interesting or compelling, they are. But, I donโt find his ideas quite as actionable as I like. It means I'll look for parallels, and it means that I'll look for context. In Popper's case, that context was the emergence of quantum physics. He was learning about the physical world at a time when physics itself was being rewritten. But, never do I find a way to actually test his ideas. It's because I'm not smart enough to figure out how to model them, or make them actionable.
I sort of feel as though you sense the same thing happening again.
Maybe we live in a parallel time. We are living in an age where the fundamental concept of information, something I've learned how write equations to describe, equations with concepts like bandwidth, signal, noise, rate and bit, that are very precise, are being scaled to magnificent complexity. Honestly, it is emotionally overwhelming.
On the other hand, I can think of examples in cases that can partially address some questions. But, I have also started to be circumspect about examples, so forgive me the indulgence.
Your question above about the behavior of a population learning about the behavior of a population is a great one, and there is an example to observe. Wall street traders are a group, when someone figures out what the group of traders in aggregate are doing, and capitalizes on it, others in the group interested in that kind of thing, copy the trend and weaken it (markets are short term zero sum). Some try to find out how to bet against it. While others ignore it, sometimes to their own peril. And personally, I don't worry too much about it because, in general, markets are somewhat constrained by reality. When they're not, when traders figure out how to do something like create a side market that affects the capitalization of the market, like a credit default swap, then I worry. In the 1930's it was trading on margin that got us. The 2000 crash was a classic bubble, the kind of behavior caused by fear of missing out. Boom-bust cycles dominated the capital markets in the the late 19th century, I think until the first world war.
In general though, the question is about feedback. Most sapiens don't have a super strong grasp about how feedback systems behave. Even those who do understand feedback might lose sight of things where the feedback and signals are multi-dimensional. Then, there are the effects of noise and errors, which is where you start your piece, young adults being subject to an unrealistic inputs. Like any good system element, they try to adjust to accommodate the input.
One of the problems with feedback systems is the polarity, positive feedback can cause instability if it is not contained in a system with greater negative feedback. And in most cases, delays and lags in the system, which affect the time varying "polarity" are key factors, in fact, the other big knob besides gain and polarity, used to tune a feedback system. A final and also large factor is a constraint/s.
As a parent of young adults, I do find the kinds of content on the web and through the ubiquitous apps, less than lovely, and I agree it makes us prone to unrealistic comparisons. But lately, I've been less concerned about the kinds of expectations the web/internet/social media create, and find myself more concerned about the sources of noise and error in our culture. In addition to widely discussed sources of misleading information, I was recently reminded of a source of noise and error in the embodiment of talk radio. To most people, this ubiquitous pass over space on the radio dial is uninteresting if it's even encountered. In our marketplace of ideas, noise and errors are not great things. A little bit of noise might help to make sure that the systems present to correct it are able to do that but large erroneous signals are hard to correct.
One feature of the discussion above is, for a given system with defined functional elements with inputs, outputs and network interconnections, a calculable response is generally possible. Remarkably complex behavior is possible for systems with a modest number of elements - see the game of lifeโฆ Still, the thing reads a little like philosophy.
A number of issues make human systems intractable, presently. First and foremost, the internal โcalculationsโ we do as elements in the system. Second, how we are actually interconnected is not well defined and is time varying. We also receive inputs from aggregated sources in groups. Finally, we have inputs from the environment.
The Dominion/Fox news case has given us a great example of the internal calculations inside semi-isolated elements in the greater social mesh.
Advertisers, media companies, food companies and many others have statistical models based on sub-groups to estimate the response to a larger campaign. So, we are already using techniques to model the response of the larger system.
Here I need to hand the argument to Heather Havrilesky who has made a case that human emotion is still the largest most important part in any of these kinds of systems. Personally, I feel that science, one starting to model human emotion is also developing strength. And, the models of emotion I sense have the strongest long term potential, involve feedback.
Very tangentially, let me pitch my most braindead critique of rationalism (or more likely a strawman thereof)
The rationalists sometimes describe rationalism as a "martial art of the mind" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/teaxCFgtmCQ3E9fy8/the-martial-art-of-rationality
> You donโt need huge, bulging muscles to learn martial arts
lol, anyway
> Within martial arts schools, techniques of muscle have been refined and elaborated over generations. Techniques of rationality are harder to pass on, even to the most willing student.
Ok so it's like martial arts: a pursuit of a discipline with a special real world relevance.
The only problem is that also martial arts seem to be pretty fake? And maybe in a pretty similar way? I'm mostly getting this from this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA
This theory goes that a lot of what passes for martial arts is people LARPing hand to hand combat. When revered masters of many traditions meet people who actually fight and don't have to follow their rules, they get the shit kicked out of them. Being really really good at hand to hand combat is already a very teenage boy idea of what it means to be formidable, but if it also utterly fails on those terms, that's very funny.
When you talk about your ideas getting "absolutely demolished" by the scary rationalists it makes me wonder what kind of demolition we are talking here. Are they getting knocked out, or are they just losing the equivalent of a karate chop contest..
I guess this all just dancing around the question: what are we doing here? What are all these ideas and stories and graphs and arguments *for*? I think there are some potential good answers for this that don't involve escaping critique from imagined rationalists :)
Listen: U THINK, Therefore U WRITE. Rationalism and Art kan subsist 2getha. How do we know?? The Father of RATIONALISM, RENE DESCARTES combined GEOMETRY and ALEGEBRA. ART & MATH!! Say What?? (Thereby causing generations of students to FLUNK....but thats another thought for another day). Youth-Obsessed kulture seems 2 B driven by GREED n AMBITION rather than any form of RATIONAL thought (re: a nod to your point about CELEBS). In short: Artists have to learn to fuse the two and be RATIONAL in your approach to Ya ART butt be IRRATIONAL in the EXECUTION of it.
Reading this made me think of a part of this book that is totally worth it tho quite pop - never split the difference (by a former FBI negotiator on negotiating) - about how humans are not... rational. So rational solutions don't work well in irrational systems such as 1:1 human dynamics.
This whole lil section is worth reading, but I'll try to excerpt it: https://subwayreads.org/book/never-split-the-difference/. He essentially goes to Harvard and kicks everyone's ass at negotiating who has been studying it and creating rational theories about it since the nixon administration, and reflects on why that happened --
For more than three decades, Harvard had been the world epicenter of negotiating theory and practice. All I knew about the techniques we used at the FBI was that they worked. In the twenty years I spent at the Bureau weโd designed a system that had successfully resolved almost every kidnapping we applied it to. But we didnโt have grand theories.
...
In my short stay [in Harvard Law Schoolโs Winter Negotiation Course] I realized that without a deep understanding of human psychology, without the acceptance that we are all crazy, irrational, impulsive, emotionally driven animals, all the raw intelligence and mathematical logic in the world is little help in the fraught, shifting interplay of two people negotiating.
Yes, perhaps we are the only animal that hagglesโa monkey does not exchange a portion of his banana for anotherโs nutsโbut no matter how we dress up our negotiations in mathematical theories, we are always an animal, always acting and reacting first and foremost from our deeply held but mostly invisible and inchoate fears, needs, perceptions, and desires.
Thatโs not how these folks at Harvard learned it, though. Their theories and techniques all had to do with intellectual power, logic, authoritative acronyms like BATNA and ZOPA, rational notions of value, and a moral concept of what was fair and what was not.
And built on top of this false edifice of rationality was, of course, process. They had a script to follow, a predetermined sequence of actions, offers, and counteroffers designed in a specific order to bring about a particular outcome. It was as if they were dealing with a robot, that if you did a, b, c, and d in a certain fixed order, you would get x. But in the real world negotiation is far too unpredictable and complex for that. You may have to do a then d, and then maybe q.
This is spot on. My need to ration is often at odds with my desire to imagine. The former somehow seems like the more prestigious way to write, but I think the latter is the more important reason to write!
Very well said.
Such good Qs!! I think โmaybeโ is smart to guide a personโs insights but I like to think about subjectivity as a kind of truth because itโs true for that person. I think weโre each living a unique reality. Some people are literally living in a dystopia while others are living in luxury. We need the subjective to explain parts of our shared reality that rationality canโt reach. We canโt grow, learn, explore or change without the subjective. This is why I always think nonfiction, memoirs and essays are so valuable because itโs a form that allows us to question the abstract experiences that are hard to qualify. (Assuming the writer is trustworthy, willing to tell a story thatโs true to them haha and doesnโt have an ulterior motive to manipulate) and then you can reach people who have the same feelings but havenโt been able to put it into words. The first part of your essay did that to me! โค๏ธโ๐ฅโค๏ธโ๐ฅโค๏ธโ๐ฅ
I feel your dilemma more than I can say. On the top of everything, I have a cultural layer as well. Being Hungarian, I have a tendency of expressing myself with a directness that is often perceived as rigidly categorical. I have written several posts to make the case for the opposite, but that does not help with what is - mostly - style.
As for your question, the youth obsession is not a new phenomenon. Arguably, it started with "The Sorrows of Young Werther" which was published in 1774.
Still, I see what you mean, but I will have to think about it....
I really appreciate the nuance of this piece. I also find your acknowledgment of the need for epistemic humility incredible valuable. And I enjoyed how you wrapped it by pointing out that sometimes we canโt know for sure and so we just have to go for it. (Apologies if my paraphrase is too far off the mark). Thank you
โTo the extent that Western culture has become youth culture, Western culture valorizes what seems good to the young. The paths society consecrates as desirable โthe lowest form of consecration, but all we have leftโ are those paths which appeal to the young.โ
Nailed it. Hard stop. ๐ค๐ค๐ค
This just came across my timeline for some reason. Great read! This particular topic of social media, phones and depression was kinda trending around then, I think? Might have been due to some research? I dunno.
A couple of thoughts/questions. Are rationalist a prominent influence in any area? I think they are in the philosophy of science, but I don't know Popper well or Deutsch at all- legit curious!
Also, sometimes I think about the qualitative data being amassed by Substack. Could be a pretty valuable source for behavioral analysis. What I am asking is--how are you manipulating my behavior here and why? Haha. Cheers.