Three Responses to Incorrect Folk Ontologies

Related: perverse ontological lock-in. Building things on top of ontological categories tends to cement them since we think we need them to continue getting value from the thing. But if the folk ontology doesn't carve reality at the joints there will be friction present in all the stories/predictions/expectations built up out of those ontological pieces along with an unwillingness to drop the folk ontology on the belief that you will lose all the value of the things you've built on top. One model of the punctuated equilibrium model of psychological development is periodic rebasing operations.

I am skeptical of this whole thing, because calling someone else's side of a debate a "folk ontology" assumes that their side is the wrong side. So the whole article is basically saying "now that I've determined that my opponent is wrong, how should I deal with it?"--it sounds like a recipe for skipping that pesky debate stuff and prematurely assuming that one's opponent is wrong.

This seems on the right track, but maybe not pushed far enough. I think all human abilities (instincts, math, philosophy, etc) arose in a specific kind of environment and can't be uniquely extended to all possible environments in our universe, never mind simulated ones. I don't trust any extrapolation procedures carried very far, because they seem too sensitive (our thinking about weird situations is already quite divergent). So I guess FAI will need to give us an environment that's good and mostly normal. That way it can skip rescuing many of our preferences, because in normal environments they work fine anyway.

In addition to the first two responses elucidated by Simon, there is a third available response to incorrect folk ontologies. This is to restrict the use of the idea to the circumstances or ways in which it can be reasonably applied while recognizing that it is fundamentally unreal.

In my opinion, the idea that some things are "fundamentally real", while others are "fundamentally unreal," is itself a folk ontology which should be rejected.

When we find that the concepts typically held by people, termed folk ontologies, don't correspond to the territory, what should we do with those terms/words? This post discusses three possible ways of handling them. Each is described and discussed with examples from science and philosophy.

Relevant: a review of Seeing Like a State (again :-D).

In particular, this part:

Scott distinguishes between metis and epistemic knowledge. Epistemic knowledge is from the state, and it’s often called “rational”. It’s based in scientific or “scientificish” knowledge. It’s so general as to apply everywhere, which means it kind of winds up applying nowhere. Sometimes this looks like farming techniques that are great in theory, but in practice are incapable of adapting to any single locale. Other times it looks like geometric land distribution that ignores local conditions.

Metis is much more ambigious, a strange mix of hyper-empiricism and tradition and encoded ritual that has adapted to produce best results within a specific context. The origins of it would take a whole other book (presumably filled with Darwinian metaphors), but the point is that it works. It’s a reason that (using repeated examples of Scott’s) small village farms tend to vastly out-produce large epistemic plots;

...

In general: people have a reason they do things the way they do. The issues that arise aren’t just “humanitarian” in the sense of “people don’t like it. They’re actually pretty pragmatic, and governments that fail to recognize this (or ignore concerns as merely “petty humanitarianism”) tend towards economic and agricultural chaos. Disrupting this from the outside normally means that you don’t actually understand them. Almost always, that hubris will make life less productive and less enjoyable.

This was a very good essay. Thank you for writing it; it's a nice categorization of things I've been trying to sort out in my own interactions with "folk ontologies".

One small thing is that you mention moral nihilism is a more productive response, but you don't seem to follow it up with much justification (this is in the Rejection section).