[David Chapman] Resisting or embracing meta-rationality

I'm not going to demand anything, especially when I don't plan to reply again after this.

"Demand" is just a playful way of saying it. Feel free to state that you think what I skipped over is important as well. Or not.

But the thing that brought me into this conversation was the semantic stop sign thing. It still seems to me like that part of the conversation went "you should do X" /​ "I did X" /​ "this isn’t about you, no one does X". And based on my current understanding of what you meant by "semantic stopsign", I agree that gjm didn't do X, and it feels like you've ignored both him and myself trying to point this out.

I'm confused. I assume you meant to say that you agree with gjm that he *did* do X, and not that you agree with me that he didn't?

Anyway, "You should do X"/"I did X"/"No one does X" isn't an accurate summary. To start with, I didn't say he *should* do anything, because I don't think that's true in any sort of unqualified way -- and this is important because a description of effects of a type of action is not an accusation while the presupposition that he isn't doing something he should be doing kinda is. Secondly, the thing I described the benefits of, which he accused me of accusing him of not doing, is not a thing I said "no one does". Plenty of people do that on plenty of occasions. Everyone *also* declines to do it in other cases, and that is not a contradiction.

The actual line I said is this:

The frame that "I know that X will happen, and I'm just saying it shouldn't" falls apart when you look at it closely and stop allowing "should" to function as a semantic stop sign

Did he "look closely" and "stop allowing 'should' to function as a semantic stop sign"? Here's his line:

you expect-2 X when you think that X should happen (more precisely, that some person/group/institution should make it happen; more precisely, that the world will be a better place according to your values or theirs if they do).

He did take the first step. You could call it two, if you want to count "this specific person is the one who should make it happen" as a separate step, but it's not a sequential step and not really relevant. "This should happen"->"the world would be better if it did" is the only bit involving the 'should', and that's a single step.

Does that count as "looking closely"? I don't see how it can. "Looking at all", sure, but I didn't say "Even the most cursory look possible will reveal..". You have to look *closely*. AND you have to "stop allowing 'should' to function as a semantic stopsign".

He did think "What do I mean by that?", and gave a first level answer to the question. But he didn't "stop using should as a stop sign". He still used "should", and "should" is still a stop sign. When you say "By 'should', I mean ____", what you're doing is describing the location of the stop sign. He may have moved it back a few yards, but it's still there, as evidenced by the fact that he used "should" and then attributed meaning to it. When you stop using should as a stopsign, there's no more should. As in "I don't think Chapman 'should' do anything. The concept is incoherent".

It's like being told "This thing you're in is an airplane. If you open the throttle wide, and you resist the temptation to close it, you will pick up speed and take off", and then thinking you've falsified that because you opened the throttle for three seconds seconds and the plane didn't take off.

I expect there's a charitable explanation for this, but I honestly don't have one in mind.

In general it's better to avoid talking about specific things people have done which can be interpreted as "wrong" unless you have an active reason to believe that focus will actually stay on "is it true?" rather than "who loses status if it's true" -- or unless the thing is actually "wrong" in the sense that the behavior needs to be sanctioned. It's not that things can't get dragged there anyway if you're talking about the abstract principles themselves, but at least there's a better chance of focus staying on the principles where it should be.

I was kinda hoping that by saying "Takeoff distance is generally over a quarter mile, and many runways are miles long", you'd recognize why the plane didn't take off without needing to address it specifically.

So, okay, I have to remember here that this thread originally came up when I felt like you'd think you knew better than me what was in my own head, and then fair play to you, you didn't. But then you defended the possibility of doing that, without having done it in that specific case. So this bit has to be caveated with a "to the extent that you actually did the thing", which I kind of think you did a bit with gjm and Richard but I'm not super sure right now.

Well, I was pretty careful to not comment on what Richard and gjm were doing. I didn't accuse gjm of anything, nor did I accuse Richard of anything. I see what TAG saw. I also saw gjm respond to my "self-predictably false expectation is a failure of rationality" in the way that someone would respond if they weren't aware of any reason to believe that other than a lack of awareness of the perspective that claims "there's two senses of the word 'expect'" is a solution -- and in a way that I can't imagine anyone responding if they were aware of the very good reasons that can coexist with that awareness.

I think those pieces of evidence are significant enough that dismissing them as meaningless is a mistake, so I defended TAGs decision to highlight a potential problem and I chose to highlight another myself. Does it mean that they *were* doing the things that this interpretation of the evidence points towards? Not necessarily. I also didn't assert anything of the sort. It's up to the individual to figure out how likely they think that is.

If, despite not asserting these things, you think you know enough about what's going on in my mind that you can tell both my confidence level and how my reasoning doesn't justify it, then by all means lemme know :P

But at best they're epistemically illegible; you can't share the evidence that makes you confident here, in a way that someone else can verify it.

I mean, not *trivially*, yeah. Such is life.

And it's worse than that, because they're the sort of thing I feel like people often self-delude about. Which is not to say you're doing that; only that I don't think I can or should rule out the possibility.

For sure, it's definitely a thing that can happen and you shouldn't rule it out unless you can tell that it's not that -- and if you say you can't tell it's not that, I definitely believe you. However, "it's just self delusion" does make testable predictions.

So for example, say I claim to be able to predict the winning lottery numbers but it's really just willful delusion. If you say "Oh that's amazing! What are tomorrows numbers?", then I'm immediately put to the choice of 1) sticking my neck out, lying, and putting a definite expiration date on having my any BS taken seriously, 2) changing my story in "unlikely" ways that show me to be dodging this specific prediction without admitting to a general lack of predicting power ("Oh, it doesn't work on March 10ths. Total coincidence, I know. Every other day though.."), or 3) clarifying that my claims are less bold than that ("I said I can predict *better than chance*, but it's still only a ~0.1% success rate"), and getting out of having my claims deflated by deflating them myself.

By iterating these things, you can pretty quickly drive a wedge in that separates sincere people from the delusional -- though clever sociopathic liars will be bucketed with the sincere until those expiration dates start arriving. It takes on order n days to bound their power to predicting at most 1/n, but delusion can be detected as fast as anticipations can be elicited.

But as a reader, they look very similar, and I think I'm justified in reacting to them similarly.

Well, you're justified in being skeptical, for sure. But there's an important difference between "Could be just self delusion, I dunno.." and "*Is* just self delusion" -- and I think you'd agree that the correct response is different when you haven't yet been able to rule out the possibility that it's legit.

There are ways to make me more disposed to believe you in situations like this, which I think roughly boil down to "make it clear that you have seen the skulls".

For sure, there are skulls everywhere. The traps get really subtle and insidious and getting comfortable and declaring oneself "safe" isn't a thing you ever get to do. However, it sounds like the traps you're talking about are the ones along the lines of "failing to even check  whether you anticipate it being true before saying "Pshh, you're just saying that because you haven't read Guns Germs and Steel. Trust me bro, read it and you'll believe me"" -- and those just aren't the traps that are gonna get ya if you're trying at all.

My point though was that there are successes everywhere too. "Seeing someone's mind do a thing that they themselves do not see" is very very common human behavior, even though it's not foolproof. In fact, a *really good* way to find out what your own mind is doing is to look at how other people respond to you, and to try to figure out what it is they're seeing. That's how you find things that don't fit your narrative.
 

 I've written another recent comment on that subject, though only parts of it are relevant here.

I get your distaste for that kind of comment, and I agree that there's ways Val could have put in more effort to make it easier to accept. At the same time, recoiling from such things is a warning sign, and "nuggets of wisdom from above" is the last thing you want to tax.

I still remember something Val said to me years ago that had a similar vibe. In the end, I don't think he was right, but I do think he was picking up on something and I'm glad he was willing to share the hypothesis. Certainly some other nuggets have been worth the negligible cost of listening to them.

So I don't think the point of friction here is about whether or not I understand the mental shift. I think the point of friction is, I have no idea why you described it as "there's only one kind of expect".

Because there's only one kind of expect. There's "expecting", and there's "failing to expect, while pretending to be expecting and definitely not failing". These are two distinct things, yes. Yet only the former is actually expecting.

It can seem like "I expect-2, then I introspect and things change, and I come out of it with expect-1". As if "expect-2" is a tool that is distinct from expect-1 and sometimes the better tool for the job, but in this case you set the former down and picked up the latter. As if in *this case* you looked closer and thought "Oh wow, I guess I was mistaken! That's a torx bolt not an allen bolt!".

There's *another* mental shift though, on the meta level, which starts to happen after you do this enough.

So you keep reaching for "expect-2", and it kinda sorta works from time to time, but *every time* you look closer, you think "Ah, this is another one of those cases where an expect-2 isn't the right tool!". And so eventually you start to notice that it's curiously consistent, but you think "Well, seeing a bunch of white swans doesn't disprove the existence of black swans! I just haven't found the right job for this tool yet!" -- or rather "All the right jobs are coincidentally the ones I haven't examined in much detail! Because they're so obvious!".

Eventually you start to notice that there's a pattern to it. It's not just "This context is completely different, the considerations that determine which tool to use are completely different, and what a coincidence! The answer still points the same way!". It's "Oh, I followed the same systematic path, and ended up with the same realization. I wonder if maybe there's something fundamental going on here?". Eventually you get to the point where you start to look at the path itself, and recognize that what you're doing is exposing delusion, and the things which tell you what step to take next are indicators of delusion which you've been following. Eventually you notice that the whole "unique flavor" that *defined* "expect-2" is actually the flavor of delusion which you've been seeking out and exposing. And that the active ingredient in there, which made it kinda work when it did, has been expect-1 this whole damn time. It's not "a totally different medicine". It's the same medicine mixed with horseshit.

At some point it becomes a semantic debate because you can define a sequence of characters to mean anything -- if you don't care about it being useful or referring to the same thing others use it to refer to. You could define "expect-2" as "expect-1, mixed with horse shit, and seen by the person doing it as a valid and distinct thing which is not at all expect-1 mixed with horse shit", but it won't be the same thing others refer to when they say "expect-2" -- because they'll be referring to a valid and distinct thing which is not at all expect-1 mixed with horse shit (even though no such thing exists), and when asked to point at "expect-2" they will point at a thing which is in fact a combination of expect-1 and horseshit.

Like... even assuming I've made this mental shift, that's not the same as just expect-1ing him to show up on time? This feels like telling me that "a coin showing heads" is the same as "a coin that I've just flipped but not yet looked at", because once I look I'll either have the first thing or I'll be able to deal with not having it.

Expectations will shift. To start with you have a fairly even allocation of expectation, and this allocation will shift to something much more lopsided depending on the evidence you see. However, it was never actually in a state of "Should be heads, dammit". That wasn't a "different kind of expectation, which can be wrong-1 without being wrong-2, and was 100% allocated to heads". Your expectation 1 was split 50/50 between heads and tails, and you were swearing up and down that tails wasn't a legitimate possibility because you didn't want it to be. That is all there is, and all there ever was.

And that's from the perspective of the boss. Suppose I'm the employee and my boss says that to me. I can't make the mental shift for her. It probably wouldn't go down very well to ask "ah, but do you predict that I'll show up on time? Because if you don't, then you should come to terms with that and work with me to..."

Maybe if my boss did make this mental shift, then that would be good for me too. But given that she hasn't, I kind of need to know: when she used the word "expect" there, was that expect-1 or expect-2? Telling me about a mental shift she could make in the way she relates to expectations seems unhelpful. Telling me that the two kinds of expectations are the same seems worse than useless.

Ah, but look at what you're doing! You're talking about telling your boss what she "should" do! You're talking about looking away from the fact that you know damn well what she means so that you can prop up this false expectation that your boss will "come to terms with that"! *Of course* that's not going to work!

You want to go in the opposite direction. You want to understand *exactly* what she means: "I'm having trouble expecting you to do what I want. I'm a little bothered by that. Rather than admit this, I am going to try to take it out on you if you don't make my life easier by validating my expectations". You want to not get hung up at the stage of "Ugh, I don't want to have to deal with that"/"She shouldn't do that, and I should tell her so!", and instead do the work of updating your own maps until you no longer harbor known-false expectations and attach desires to possibilities which aren't real.

When you've done that, you won't think to say "You should come to terms with that" to your boss, even if everyone would be better off if she did, because doing so will sound obviously stupid instead of sounding like something that "should" work. What you choose to say still depends on what you end up seeing but whatever it is will feel *different* -- and quite different on the other side too.

Imagine you're the boss putting on your serious face and telling an employee that you expect them to show up on time from now on. It's certainly aggravating if they say "Ah, but do you mean that? You should work on that!". But what if you put your serious face on, you say to them "Bob, I noticed that you've been late a couple times recently, and I expect you to be on time from now on", and in response, Bob gives you a nice big warm smile and exclaims "I like your optimism!".

It still calls out the same wishful thinking on the bosses part, but in a much more playful way that isn't flinching from anything. Sufficiently shitty bosses can hissy fit about anything, but if you imagine how *you* would respond as a boss, I think you'd have a hard time not admitting to yourself "Okay, that's actually kinda funny. He got me", even if you try to hide it from the employee. I expect that you'd have a real hard time being mad if the employee followed up "I like your optimism!" with a sincere "I expect I will too.". And I bet you'll be a little more likely to pivot from "I expect!" towards something more like "It's important that we're on time here, can I trust that you won't let me down?".