Affordance Widths

This is an unusually difficult post to review. In an ideal world, we'd like to be able to review things as they are, without reference to who the author is. In many settings, reviews are done anonymously (with the author's name stricken off), for just this reason. This post puts that to the test: the author is a pariah. And ordinarily I would say, that's irrelevant, we can just read the post and evaluate it on its own merits.

Other comments have mentioned that there could be PR concerns, ie, that making the author's existence and participation on LessWrong salient is embarrassing. I don't think this is an appropriate basis for judging the post, and would prefer to judge it based on its content.

The problem is, I think this post may contain a subtle trap, and that understanding its author, and what he was trying to do with this post, might actually be key to understanding what the trap is.

Ialdabaoth had a metaproblem, which was this: he had conspicuous problems, in a community full of people who would try start conversations where they help analyze his problems for him; but if those people truly understood him, they might turn on him. So he created narratives to explain why those conversations were so confusing, why he wouldn't follow the advice, and why the people trying to help him were actually wronging him, and therefore indebted. This post is one such narrative. Here's another.

The core idea of this post is that spectrum-direction advice is structured as a pair of failure modes, which may have either a variably-sized gap or a variably-sized overlap, depending on the post. This is straightforwardly true. But I think that the next inferential step the post takes after that, about how people do and should respond to that, is wrong. Charles, David, and Edgar should all be rejecting the frame in which they're tuning {B}, and instead be looking for third options which make {B} irrelevant. This is easy to overlook when {B} is a generic placeholder rather than a specific behavior, but becomes clear when applied to specific examples. Edgar, in particular, is described as doing a probably-catastrophically-wrong thing, presented as though it were the obvious reaction to circumstances.

I suspect that, if this concept were widespread and salient, especially presented in its current form, the main effect would be to help people rationalize their way out of doing the obvious things to solve their problems, and to explain their confusion when other people seem to not be doing the obviously things. I think there's a next-inferential-step post that I would be happy with, but this one isn't it.

Since others have done a contextualized review, I'll aim to do a decoupled review, with a caveat that I think the contextual elements are important for consideration with inclusion into the compendium.

Okay. There’s a social interaction concept that I’ve tried to convey multiple times in multiple conversations, so I’m going to just go ahead and make a graph.

I’m calling this concept “Affordance Widths”.

I'd like to see a clear definition here before launching into an example. In fact, there's no clear definition in the whole post as far as I can tell, and would like to see that added to the post.

Let’s say there’s some behavior {B} that people can do more of, or less of. And everyone agrees that if you don’t do enough of the behavior, bad thing {X} happens; but if you do too much of the behavior, bad thing {Y} happens.

I'd like to see a concrete example here, which may just be a stylistic choice but is also I think just easier to follow as a human. A simple example would be something like "If you're over-confident, then you appear arrogant, but if you're underconfident, then you appear weak". This is done way later with the job interview example, but I have the preference to start concrete then generalize.

Bob understands that {B} can be an important behavior, and that there’s a minimum acceptable level of {B} that you need to do to not suffer {X}, and a maximum amount you can get away with before you suffer {Y}. And Bob feels like {X} is probably more important a deal than {Y} is. But generally, he and Adam are going to agree quite a bit about what’s an appropriate amount of {B}ing for people to do. (Bob’s heuristic about how much {B} to do is the thin cyan line.)

Charles isn’t so lucky, by comparison. He’s got a *very* narrow band between {X} and {Y}, and he has to constantly monitor his behavior to not fall into either of them. He probably has to deal with {X} and {Y} happening a lot. If he’s lucky, he does less {B} than average; if he’s not so lucky, then he tries to copy Bob’s strategy and winds up getting smacked with {Y} way more often than Bob does.

Poor David’s in a situation called a “double bind”. There is NO POSSIBLE AMOUNT of {B} he can do to prevent both {X} and {Y} from happening; he simply has to choose his poison. If he tries Bob’s strategy, he’ll get hit hard with {X} *AND* {Y}, simultaneously, and probably be pretty pissed about it. On the other hand, if he runs into Charles, and Charles has his shit figured out, then Charles might tell him to tack into a spot where David only has to deal with {X}. Bob and Adam are going to be utterly useless to David, and are going to give advice that keeps him right in the ugly overlap zone.

Then there’s Edgar. Edgar’s fucked. There is no amount of behavior that Edgar can dial into, where he isn’t getting hit hard by {X} *and* {Y}. There’s places way out on the extreme - places where most people are getting slammed hard by {X} or slammed hard by {Y} - where Edgar notices a slight decrease in the contra failure mode. So Edgar probably spends most of his time on the edges, either doing all-B or no-B, and people probably tell him to stop being so black-and-white about B and find a good middle spot like everyone else. Edgar probably wants to punch those people, starting with Adam.

The word choice here is editorializing in a way that feels not useful for truthseeking. Its' clearly saying Bob is an asshole for not understanding poor Edgar's plight, when it should be working to get across the concept that people have different allowances for their behavior.

Why I think this concept is useful:

So, I think the post is not amazing at getting across the concept. But I think the concept itself is quite useful, here's why:

When I read Scott Alexanders "Different Worlds" post, I was not at all surprised or amazed or enlightened by the post. I knew people had vastly different experiences of the world, and one of the reasons for that was having shifted my affordance widths in various domains in the past.

I had shifted things so that I could be more clear about my desires without seeming pushy, or less manic in my work without seeming lazy, for example. When I told other people about this, they had never even realized there was such a thing as an affordance width they could shift.

In comparison to them, I had seen how by changing my affordance width, it changed my experience of the world. I feel like if the concept of an afforadance width was in more people's vocabulary, they would both me more understanding of people with different worlds, and have more agency to realize they could change the experience of their own world.

In addition, I've also experienced the phenomena of different affordance widths in different contexts. For instance, when I moved to the UK, the affordance width for confidence leading to arrogance was much narrower, whereas the afforadance width for talking about certain topics without being ostracized was much higher.

Being able to point at that thing as a concept is certainly useful, both to be able to talk about the thing, as well as to be able to shift the thing (for instance, the affordance for consensual touch without being perceived as weird was too low for my tastes at the EA hotel, and I worked to raise that affordance width).

So, I think this post talks about a concept that's important, and useful, and I'd like to see it reworked to do a better job of getting across the underlying concept without editorializing too much about how awful it is to have low affordance widths.

Definitely makes sense. A commonly cited example is women in an office workplace; what would be average assertiveness for a male is considered "bitchy", but they still suffer roughly the same "weak" penalties for non-assertiveness.

With the advice-giving aspect, some situations are likely coming from people not knowing what levers they're actually pulling. Adam tells David to move his "assertiveness" lever, but there's no affordance gap available for David by moving that lever -- he would actually have to move an "assertiveness + social skill W" lever which he doesn't have, but which feels like a single lever for Adam called "assertiveness". Not all situations are such; there's no "don't be a woman" or "don't be autistic lever". Sometimes there's some other solution by moving along a different dimension and sometimes there's not.

I have probably used the concept of "Affordance widths" 3 or 4 times since this post, not as much as some others but still enough.

More importantly, I think it builds upon the ideas in Scott Alexander's "Different Worlds": https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/ in more testable ways, and I would love to see more experimentation with the concept of affordance widths and perception

I feel like the question of how different people are perceived is core to understanding group dynamics.

I remember thinking when I originally read this 'oh this is insightful' and then again when I re-read it I had the same thought. Then I realized that's exactly the type of one feels-like-an-insight thinking the review is trying to get us away from! I've never used the concept or even thought about it since I first read the post, nor encountered it elsewhere, despite assuming I would do so. Bad sign.

This is a good name for a concept I've encountered in other fields. Consider climate change. {B} is the amount of fossil fuels we burn. {X} is "climate change breaks agriculture beyond repair and billions die". {Y} is "we do not have enough energy to run civilization as we know it and billions die". We're Adam if we can create abundant renewable energy in a short timeframe and also develop effective carbon sequestration technology, and we're Edgar if we remain dependent on rapidly-depleting fossil fuels.

It seems to make sense to make this graph 2-dimensional, with axes {A} and {B}, and plot Adam-Edgar as points on it. Clearly this isn't about {B}, and avoiding {X} and {Y} through adjusting {B} is hopeless. Clearly this is about {A}, and the right course of action is to figure out what {A} is.

It seems to me that for any given {B}, the vast majority of Adams would deny {B} having this property, or at the very least deny that they are Adams in the given case. I think that's what it feels like from the inside, too - recognizing Adamness in oneself feels difficult, but it seems like a higher waterline in that regard is necessary to stop the phenomenon of useless or net-negative advice among other downstream consequences.

It does make sense and I like the visual presentation of the situation as well.

One thing I would also mention, given we're talking about social interactions and behaviors, is that we might not just want to see {B} as the causal source of {X} or {Y}.

I do think that we can consider {B} as a multi-margin type observation-- so we don't get to just look at some metric call amount but also need to look at some qualitative aspect, how {B} is done. I think that is in line with the comment below about being assertive without domineering being a learned skill as much as just learning to be assertive.

But I think {X} and {Y} also need to be put in that social behavior space where we need to learn how to do those as well. If so we might see that David and Edgar's dilemma is less about the amount of {B} they do or quality/how they do {B} but perhaps more about how the culture or society related to those two. Is it really {B} that is driving the response? If not are those {X} and {Y} appropriate or correct responses to David or Edgar doing {B}?

On one hand this picture is appealing and I can intuitively immagine what being each of the characters might feel like.

But on the other hand I would strongly prefer a view where everyone is basically the same. In this view everyone has the same Adam's graph. But Edgar still constantly suffers X and Y, not because they overlap, but because he has no idea how much B he is really doing, so he is constantly jumping from low B to high B. I believe that this is a large component in any social-skill problems.

For example, if a deaf man tried to vocalize, he would be either way too loud of way too quiet most of the time, and he would suffer the corresponding consequences of both. For him to accurately guess the appropriate volume is near impossible. On the other hand, Adam who has a perfectly good hearing and a good control over his voice, is able to accurately speak louder or quieter while still fitting into the appropriate volume range, and he is feeling very free. There is a difference in their experience, but it is not because they are treated differently, or have different minds.

One reason I don't like your graph is that I have no idea how to suffer both X and Y at the same time, for the same action. I don't know how a single action can be both too assertive and too weak, as in your example.

Another issue is that it's not clear to me whether the affordance width is a property of your mind, or a property of how society treats people like you. The latter does make sense when the punishment is also social. But the former doesn't really fit your examples, because people don't actually know what your mind looks like, unless you choose to reveal it by doing a weird amount of B.

ialdabaoth is banned [LW · GW], as discussed in more length there. Review comments should focus on whether or not the post is a useful idea, rather than on whether or not it would hurt the reputation of LW or the review to contain this post in it.

Rest assured that if this post is included in the final book, it will include some sort of disclaimer or warning about why the author was exiled, and how that impacts how we think the idea should be read.

Although normally I am all for judging arguments by their merits, regardless of who speaks them, I think that in this particular case we need to think twice before including the essay in the "Best of 2018" book. The notoriety of the author is such that including it risks serious reputation damage for the community, especially that the content of the essay might be interpreted as a veiled attempt to justify the author's moral transgressions. To be clear, I am not saying we should censor everything that this man ever said, but giving it the spotlight in "Best of 2018" seems like a bad choice.

In most of the situations where this is most salient to me, {B} is a social behavior, and {X} and {Y} are punishments that people mete out to people who do not conform to correct {B}-ness.

Notwithstanding this, I note that the model of affordance widths also seems apt for modeling binds in situations where the constraints are imposed by uncaring parts of the universe, rather than the social web.

Take as an example the task of riding a bike, where potential hazards include {X} riding too slowly and falling over and {Y} riding too quickly and losing control. Here, taking speed as {B}, it seems quite natural that different people might have different affordance widths for speed.

What does this buy us? Well, once again we see that the natural advice on "how to ride a bike better" for [A] might be actively misleading for [C], and the best advice for [D] and [E] might be in a different class entirely. So the concept seems like a useful tool for anyone considering how to give advice to other people on how to do things.

(A more complicated example that I've been thinking about recently is the task of forming predictions under uncertainty, where {B} is something like "trust your intuition"; generating various kinds of {X} and {Y} are left as an exercise.)

I'd really like to see that done with MULTIPLE men and women, and unprimed audiences. My intuition says that which PARTICULAR man and woman are used matters, a lot.

I've had a read of this post.

It seems rather whiny. I'm struggling to see the value to the advancement of rational thinking.

edited to add - Imagine if this was an English comprehension test and the question was "with which character does the author most identify with?"

To me, the most useful part of this post is that it introduces this idea that affordances are personal, i.e. some people are allowed to do X while others are not. I like to see this as part of the pervasive social machinery that is Omega [LW · GW].

I imagine people of a certain political background to want to sneer at me, as in, "why did it take someone in your in-group to tell you this?"

To which I admit that, indeed, I should have listened. But I suppose I didn't (enough), and now I did, so here we are with a post that made my worldview more empathetic. The bottom line is what matters.

Unprimed audience is a huge part of this, as ialdbaoth says, and that experiment was also very different in setting than an office environment, for example.

The term "affordance width" makes sense, but perhaps there's no need to coin a new term when "tolerance" exists already.

While the author here has been credibly accused of abuse, and so I have no desire to raise his social status, I see this concept as valuable. In fact, it is a good model of at least one element of the vaguely-defined concept of privilege.

Take general social assertiveness. Men are generally Bob, while women are more often Carol. However, it appears that women look at all the B men are getting away with without suffering Y, and see men as Adam. On the other hand, men see the amount of B women can afford not to do without suffering X, and see women as Alice. Therefore, women talk about the male privilege of being able to do B, while men sometimes talk about the female privilege of being able to not do B (only sometimes, because an element of B is not complaining about it).

However, this does not change the fact that Bob is genuinely in a better position than Carol.

I'd like to see more examples, though it's quite possible they're sensitive or otherwise bad to discuss in public. But right now I feel that I understand the model in theory but not at all where I should be applying it.

I would like to see a post on this concept included in the best of 2018, but I also agree that there are reputational risks given the author. I'd like to suggest possible compromise - perhaps we could include the concept, but write our own explanation of the concept instead of including this article?