Hey Hano was the one who got mad at me — StreetlightX

This isn't correct on a couple of levels — Hanover

Yeah, I see what you mean. How dare he!

Well at least the women of Texas have you to thank for -- what was it again?

Should we even believe your claims to care about the women of Texas? Or should we look at what you do? Which is what exactly?

Maybe you can explain to us what you yelling at @Hanover from the other side of the world does to help the women of Texas.

Quick note on the methodology here.

The idea of the bone-headed approach is to resist using the abstractions (intent, values) that have already accumulated here, so that we can catch abstraction in the act. We want to see what motivated the step of abstraction, or what forced it. What is the precise function of the step of abstracting, what purpose or need does it serve?

Around here that might be, what failure would force me to consider an abstract element of my action, and of yours, called the "intention"? That's more work, so why do we do it? (That's actually an open question at the moment. I could see an argument that checking whether we're the same in one way is cheaper than checking if we're alike in general, since that's checking a huge number of component identities. But that assumes a lot of abstracting already done. It just sounds too textbook-ish to be true.)

(( It used to be common to say that ancient cultures did not consider your intention at all when judging your actions right or wrong. Sleeping with your mother is wrong even if you don't know it's her. And, the story goes, it was Christianity that ushered in the era of obsessing over intentions. Don't know if there's any truth to any of that. If so, we're trying to catch ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. ))

One further note on my example: it should be clear enough how full-on bigotry works here; if certain steps of abstracting are not available, you might quickly conclude, "You're a woman (or not white, or the wrong religion, etc.) so there's nothing you can do to be enough like me," for some value of "enough".

But we'll be getting to putting values on "enough" eventually, I'm sure.

Passing by the theory of theorizing, with some effort.

It's not a way I'd have looked at things at all — Isaac

Nor I!

Not all that happy with the result, but glad I did it. I was in a mode of trying to think through it in the most bone-headed way I could imagine, and it struck me that the absolute simplest way to judge someone else is by whether they do the same thing I do. (It's not impossible that has actually happened in this thread.)

As you say, we get pretty quickly into what's to count as "the same", but I'm still glad I started with (1) because it does something helpful, or, rather, it would have if I had been a little more careful: it leaves no room for akrasia. I think this is why I was reluctant to jettison it at the end of the post -- you don't get credit for having the right intentions but for acting with the right intentions. I really want to keep that, despite my oh-so-modern inclination to redefine the intent of the one who doesn't act. (He must have some other preference that's even stronger, blah blah blah.) What if we don't rush to treat intentions as a sort of theoretical generalization of actions, but honor the traditional recognition that between the intention and the act there falls a shadow?

my story-telling ... we agreed to try and avoid that — Isaac

Oh no, I just said I wasn't going to do it for you. You do you. I have Lakoff (who's a challenge for me, temperamentally) and Goffman in my to-read-soon-ish pile. I'm interested in your narratives, it's just not one of my tools -- oh and I'm slightly allergic to the word "narrative" but I'll get over it.

Back to business.

The big virtue of same-as-me as a strategy is that it's dirt cheap. It even has a sheen of reasonableness in this case that it usually lacks -- usually it looks like bigotry, to be honest -- because we are all of us facing some version of the same choice.

It's such a dead simple strategy that I wonder if it isn't always step 1, but one we've learned to pass over so quickly we almost miss it. So what I'm interested in is how and when we say "Just like me unless ..." or "Just like me except ..."

Here's a sort of sitcom example. Older conservative businessman and a younger female colleague heading to a meeting; older guy wearing standard conservative suit, young woman dressed like she's going out for drinks with friends (whatever that looks like). What the older guy wants to say is, essentially, "Why aren't you dressed like me?" even though that's ludicrous on its face (hence sitcom -- Brooks Brothers didn't have that suit in my size). So what he has to say instead is something like, "Why aren't you dressed like me, but in a way that's appropriate for you?" Or, "Why aren't you dressed the way I would dress if I were a young woman?" Yet another way to put this might be: "You can't dress exactly like me, because you're a young woman, but why didn't you dress as much like me as you could?" And hovering in the background is the fully generalized version: you're not me, but why aren't you as much like me as you can be? (And possibly there's a weird double-judgment under that: why don't you want to be as much like me as you can be? What about me do you disapprove of?)

Sadly, heading to work -- more later.

Something like this coronavirus situation, despite the way my numerous detractors paint it, there's just no way of pinning down any truth of the matter. Most (sensible) theories can be supported by the range of facts available, so all discussion can show us (if we assume it's anything more than storytelling - of which I've yet to be fully convinced) is the manner in which people muster their particular facts to support their particular theory — Isaac

For simplicity, starting with a single issue: whether to get vaccinated.

I don't know if the following is any good at all -- it's all off-the-cuff -- and it's not perfectly obvious how it connects to our recent more abstract exchange, but it has the virtue of going directly at the main question...



What's interesting, and with any luck helpful, here is that this is not the typical case of ethical judgment. In our case, everyone forming such a judgment has faced the same choice themselves.

That means there are two obvious options, which may or may not be important:

1. Approve of making the same decision I did; disapprove otherwise.
2. Approve of following the same process I did; disapprove otherwise.

For people who want both 1 and 2, there's a potential quandary if someone uses the same process but with a differing result. Presumably that indicates they used differing inputs. They shouldn't do that, hence

3. Approve of using the same inputs I did; disapprove otherwise.

If I did the math right, 2 + 3 = 1, unless the procedure in 2 is stochastic.

This might not seem like much of a basis for an ethical judgment, but if you presume everyone facing this choice does so with the intention of behaving ethically, of judging their own decision to be an ethical one, it's not all that crazy.

Can we make the just-like-me approach fail? Is that even possible, if I've set up my criteria this way?

I'm going to cheat now, because it looks to me like the weak spot is 3 (which in turn will tend to weaken 1). This is the weak spot because "inputs" looks way too big: that's not just what you read in the news, or what you read in scientific journals, if you do that sort of thing, or what you may have experienced either personally or professionally; it's also you, your personal health and your circumstances. If you're allergic to something in the vaccine, you can't take it, even though I can, and there's no way I can ignore that and be ethical.

So how do we account for that sort of difference with a rule as simplistic as the rules above? Remember, we're only doing this -- only making these ridiculous rules -- because in this case everyone judging another's decision has had to make exactly such a decision themselves, and that's not the usual case. We're not crafting the General Rules of Ethical Behavior; we're letting people leverage the work they already put in making their own decision to reduce the burden of judging others. Because we can.

So far as I know, I am not allergic to anything in the vaccine. Does someone who is have to make the same choice I did about whether to get vaccinated? That looks like a definite "no" to me. They had no choice. What does that mean for our rules? Have we succeeded in forcing failure? Rule 3, being overbroad, fails, and thus many instances of 1? (Some people might just plump for 1 straight-up, and they're fine.)

I don't think so. I think you get to keep just-like-me and simply exclude the allergic. They didn't face the choice I did, made no decision like or unlike mine, and I judge them not.

How far can we go with this faced-the-same-choice-I-did business? Do we expect the circle to shrink and shrink and shrink until it's only me that faced the same choice I did? I don't see why. But I admit it is now unclear whether the hard part -- which we have made shockingly easy for ourselves so far -- is reaching an ethical judgment, or deciding who is subject to our judgment.

For a concrete example, suppose I am obese and have diabetes. I am at risk of getting seriously ill and needing hospitalization if I get infected; for simplicity, let's say I consider it an ethical duty to minimize the risk of serious illness** so I get the vaccine. Now let's suppose someone else, call him "Isaac", has neither of the risk factors I do and is generally in very good health; Isaac chose not to get vaccinated. Do I count Isaac as facing the same choice I did? He had to decide whether or not to get vaccinated; he may have exactly the same goals I do of not getting seriously ill and needing to be hospitalized; he may have weighed the odds just as I did using the same cutoff for acceptable risk I did (this would be a rule 2 sort of thing) -- but wait a minute! What odds was he weighing? Were they the same ones I was weighing?

You get your choice here. I'm inclined to say yes, because it captures the point that we get whole columns of odds from our local public health officer, broken down by risk factor, maybe age, and so on. I kinda want those to count as one thing because they have one source and we acquire them as one thing. More tellingly, the odds are not exactly a fact about you; that certain odds apply to you, and certain odds don't, is a fact about you.

Which brings me right to the next bit: Isaac weighed the same odds I did; he selected from those columns of odds the ones that apply to him, just as I did; but the particular odds he selected were different because he's different. There is an exact point where -- even though he followed the same process I did with the same external inputs -- because the process involves direct reference to the decision maker, he diverged!

What do I do about the Isaac case? Remember, I don't really want to say that he failed to use the same inputs as I did (that I used me, and he used Isaac) and so is subject to my judgment but fails rule 3: he read exactly the same odds sheet I did, and I want to call that responsible and ethical. But when he did, and checked for his risk factors, he found different odds applied to him.

That's a problem because I approve of Isaac's inputs, and I approve of his process, so I should approve of his choice, but his choice was different from mine, so how can I approve? The whole point of 2 + 3 = 1 is that it's how I judge my own decision to have been ethical. If I have to let Isaac slide, I have to give up something: either I have no basis for concluding that my own decision was good (before it was because I did 2 and 3 right), or I just give up all the rules past 1 and disapprove of Isaac.

I can plump for same-decision-as-me, but suppose I really like the 2 + 3 = 1 approach; can I rule that Isaac, because his odds were different, did not face the same choice I did and is not subject to my judgment, just as if he were allergic to the vaccine? I think that's a cop-out. You save the model from failure only by pushing the failing case outside the domain of application.

Besides, maybe we don't want to give up judging people with different odds; maybe Isaac is going through the same thought process we are and wants to be able to tell people with multiple risk factors, people like me, that the right decision for them is to get vaccinated.

Where we stand: we have forced the complete version of just-like-me, with all 3 rules, to fail. I have to approve of Isaac's decision because of rules 2 and 3 -- he did the same thing I did; but I have to disapprove of Isaac's decision because of rule 1 -- he didn't do the same thing I did.

Our options:

• add more rules
• give up everything past rule 1 -- looks bad, that's like just defining your decisions to be ethical
• give up rule 1 but keep 2 and 3 -- appealing because I still count as ethical, but a little weird that my actual decision drops out -- wasn't the whole point to judge the decision itself, mine and Isaac's?
• give up just-like-me altogether -- too much work, or at least too soon

** You could read this as simple rationalist egoism, but there are alternatives: maybe I consider life a gift deserving respect and conservation, and that includes my own, or maybe I feel I have a duty to those who need or care about me, maybe I'm concerned about being burden on the healthcare system. Positing this as my goal is simple and we can treat the moral and rational approaches the same.

but Truth? — Isaac

Sorry, I must not have been clear enough: I was only talking about efficiency there. (I was deliberately passing over the other stuff you talk about there, the asymptote of truth and all that.)

over-determine — Isaac

"underdetermine" I believe you'll find.

Yes, so let's grant the Quine-Duhem thing. There are still grounds for distinguishing different kinds of theories, or distinguishing one framework from another, even if "adequacy to the known facts" is no help.

I'll give a bone-headed example. I require a rule to explain this sequence

1 2 3 4

Here are two of the many rules that are adequate to the facts we have so far:

(A) The first number is 1; the nth number is the successor of the (n-1)th number.

(B) The first number is 1, the second is 2, the third is 3, and the fourth is 4.

For some purposes these rules are both good enough, but for some (A) is better and for others (B). For a lot of the stuff we care about around here, (A) is the hands-down winner.

I believe there is a lot we can say here, and I've made no special study of theory-building. There are natural virtues to look for though: robustness, generality, extensibility, "explanatory power" etc. And that's before we consider the consonance of this theory with other theories competing in their domains, the construction of theoretical frameworks, of research programs, and so on.

In short, I can take Quine-Duhem as given without throwing up my hands. In fact, it looks like an advantage that we can try new frameworks without giving up whatever progress we've made. In the longest possible run, there will still be an infinite number of theories available to explain everything that's ever happened, but so what? By then, we should be satisficed (see what I did there?) with any one of those. At that point, all bets are off anyway. Until then, so long as we are still in the process of figuring things out and there's still new data coming in, there are more things of interest than adequacy to the currently known facts.

With that out of the way, I'll start writing about coronavirus, but it should already be clear that I'm not going in assuming it's all just stories and all stories are equally good -- or whatever the right caricature of your position is. I do worry though that I may not know enough to make the distinctions others could, but I will try.

When Ryle was made Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, he commented that a chair in metaphysics is like a chair in infectious diseases: your remit is to fight it not promote it.

What we should be forbidden to consider are factors surrounding the ethical worth of the two individuals — Hanover

Well said. Excellent points all around, @Hanover.

Questionable humor? — jorndoe

Maybe if the execution weren't so perfect, but holy shit that's dead on! (I work in retail, in Georgia, and have been the recipient of multiple lectures about masks from my customers. On at least one occasion, the lecturer also had a piece on his hip, which spices things up.)

Like having the magic spear with which the hero slays the dragon. — Isaac

Heh. In the context of this paragraph and your last messages to @tim wood, this is an amusing substitution: in Disney's Sleeping Beauty, the weapon with which Prince Phillip slays Maleficent (in dragon form) is the Sword of -- wait for iiiiit -- Truth.

Are you assuming we want the truth? There doesn't seem to be much need for it. Least surprise in the long run perhaps... — Isaac

Actually, yes, that was what I was thinking. Quite short-term gains in efficiency, or gains within a department, could be overall inefficient, or in the long-term inefficient. It's a danger hierarchies are prone to by nature. Examples from the business world are endless.

As for truth, sigh. I get the argument, both because I read Nietzsche a million years ago and because my ride home from work the other night was spoiled by an interview on the radio with Donald Hoffman.

My working assumption goes something like this, speaking very loosely: evolution selects for an organism to have certain capacities that meet a need, but that doesn't mean those capacities are limited to meeting that need. We didn't evolve to be able to play baseball, but we do. I even have a pet theory that language is an accident, that we got an upgrade on our signaling ability that is far greater than any species could ever need. Satisficing can also give you something better than you asked for.

And so it could be with our ability to apprehend the truth: may not be what we were "designed" to do, but that doesn't mean we can't. It does mean it's worthwhile understanding what limitations may be built into our capacities -- there's even a long-running debate about whether throwing overhand, as in baseball, is unnatural and inherently injury-producing! -- and god knows it means being aware of what your subsystems will do if left to their own devices. ("System 1 is a machine for jumping to conclusions," as Kahnemann says.) We don't know that we can apprehend the truth, but we also don't know that we can't, and we can make the attempt. (I want to say, "can make the attempt and see", but -- trouble. We evidently can play baseball, so that's something. <Insert joke here about your favorite team's effort last night.>) 300,000 years ago we didn't have institutional science and, well, this lovely forum.

With all that in mind, I do not believe that debates such as we have here are pointless. I suppose I'm just largely in the overcoming-bias camp: we know a certain amount about the kinds of mistakes people are inclined to make without noticing, ourselves included, and we can improve our performance by being on the lookout for those mistakes. Logic was a big damn step, but there are others.

Shall we talk about pandemic ethics, now? I believe I understand your overall approach quite a bit better than I did a few days ago, so I'm curious to see if I can actually apply any of this to the questions at hand.

So the higher models are sending back a message like "I'm expecting a table, don't bother sending me any data that doesn't conform to the idea of a table".

Or, much more controversially, "I'm expecting this person I'm talking to to say things like my model of a hero/villain (delete as appropriate), don't bother sending me any interpretations of sentences that don't conform to that idea" — Isaac

What follows is a little disjointed because I kept pruning away the joints:

It sounds like filtering is not something done by a subsystem that has that purpose, some bit of business we could properly call a "filter"; rather it's a way of describing how a model at one level constrains the models below it.

One typical feature of hierarchy is that there's no transparency across levels. That is, middle managers have some authority over their domain, and within broad guidelines are only told what to get done, not how to get it done. Upper management needn't even know much about the various roles and responsibilities of employees several layers below them. "I just need to know quickly if that's a knife and I don't want to hear any minutiae about visual processing."

When there is failure, i.e., surprise, it would, by definition, be contained at the lowest level it can be (unless there's some special provision made).

It's a wonder that we can communicate at all because a system like this is designed not to acknowledge novelty unless it absolutely has to, despite the obvious facts that everyone we speak with is unique and nearly every sentence we hear has never been spoken before. (This needs a lot more thought.)

Now some remarks about the sorts of discussions had here:

Pigeonholing is common, and it's just surprise containment. You attribute to another a view you are already familiar with instead of grappling with novelty.

It often seems to me that no one here really believes in disagreement, despite the above: it is incredibly common to see people in effect take the position that if another disagrees with me it must be because they don't really understand my position. (So I'll explain it again.) This is actually pretty uncomfortable, and seems like the sort of irritant the system is designed to minimize; when we speak candidly, we speak assuming that we will be understood, so to remain in a position of continuing to believe we are not understood is odd. But it can make sense from the production side: we don't need to say anything new, and can just repeat ourselves.

Both issues call attention to the likelihood that at least some of such a system is built around satisficing rather than optimizing. Even if the models throughout the hierarchy are mostly Bayesian, so that in effect you're continually running parallel best-first searches, there have to be some operational shortcuts to safeguard efficiency: a single model running too long before reporting back a result has to count as a failure; if you run multiple models at once, the first one back with a result probably wins. (Pinker talks in Words and Rules about some evidence for such races.) Satisficing is by definition good enough, and by design cheaper than holding out for an optimal result, but it's still a shortcut.

Satisficing has obvious negative consequences in discussions such as ours: people make the first criticism that comes to mind, without reflecting that a problem that obvious would likely have been noticed by the speaker as well (see @Nagase's exasperated dispelling of the myth that Logical Positivism was founded upon an obvious logical mistake); people resort to, shall we say, "extra-logical" strategies (deflection, ad hominem, obfuscation, and the rest) -- that might seem not to meet a presumed constraint of reasoned response, but if reasoned response is hard to come up with, some other kind of response will have to do; loss of perspective is common, opponents focusing on small issues while the main point of contention recedes into the background.

*

Bah. I had expected to get back to the coronavirus debate in this one, but this already way too much. I don't feel like I've advanced the discussion, but at least you can tell me if I'm in the neighborhood of your thinking.

<oops>

Gosh, we're miles off topic. Sorry. — Isaac

I still have the case at hand in mind and will be coming back to it.

(Most threads end up being about one of a few evergreen topics, no matter how they start.)

If that makes any sense at all? — Isaac

Absolutely. Introducing hierarchy is very sound idea.

I have lots of thoughts which I am, through sheer force of will and adroit use of the "select all" and "delete" commands, not just vomiting all over your screen.

I think in terms of predictive models, of increasingly higher orders of generality which then feed back to models of lower order of generality, so for me there's two hierarchy's going on - the prior/update (assume your priors until they are overwhelmed by evidence the contrary, then update them) but also the general/specific relationship (create or update priors based on which would best support the priors of the model they form one of the data points for). — Isaac

Is this to say that as you move up a level in the hierarchy, you have a model that generates predictions about what models directly below it will be successful? Is there a rock-bottom where the models generate predictions about experience? (Trying to capture with "experience" just that we're talking about data that is not composed of models succeeding or failing, whatever it is composed of.) And then everything above is models of models?

Well that's just fine. Is this info stickied somewhere? (I could have missed it because I wasn't looking for it.)

Yeah, or some addition to his, um, intake. I still feel a bad though, because as he said himself, some of it -- and maybe all of it -- was just excitement to be here. Whatever it was, something switched off whatever self-control he had. In the Shoutbox he mentioned that he had been cautioned about his posting. I'd guess how he responded in PM to the mods was a little more revealing of his state of mind.

It still seems to me that the need to do something about someone like him is more a function of the forum software we use not supporting killfiles. Individual posters can ignore who they like, but the mods are right that it shouldn't be an expectation of participants here to have to do that. The site itself degrades. On the other hand, if filtering were possible, that policy could change and the mods wouldn't have to worry nearly so much about this sort of thing. Prishon is gone, at least in part, because of a technical limitation, and that's too bad.

Maybe there should just be a posts per day limit, but if it can't be automated, that too is a bunch more modding and an even swifter ban.

(Maybe @SophistiCat's plugin could be made official and @Michael could keep it working.)

The one thing I'd add is that since we know system 2 is the training ground for system 1 -- note -- there's hope that we can attend to our system 1 driven "instinctual" responses, and then reconstruct the system 2 analyses that went into them.

But it doesn't work like that. What your analysis of your system 1 instincts produces is a new product; there's no simple way recover the original process. What's more, system 1 does its own thing with your earlier system 2 efforts: it's purpose is to produce cheap, readily accessible summaries of the results of all that system 2 work. It is by design unfaithful to them. It's a lossy format.

So reconstruction isn't really in the offing, and all we can do is let system 2 do its job as it's currently constituted and in the current circumstances. (All the overcoming-bias types are happy if they can just get people to recognize when they've left unexamined a response it behooves them to examine.)


Note: At least that's my understanding. When first driving a car you have to think about every little thing and make lots of conscious decisions, but eventually it becomes second nature and you do it all without thinking

I can't even read the whole title on my phone, but I don't have to to know exactly what that is.

I take back every bad thing I've ever said about you.

I'll just be over here, typing along to the strange rhythms in my head...

I'm trying to get the decision to avoid the vaccine bumped up to people's system 2 to see what kind of justification they come up with. — Isaac

That's generally what we do around here, right.

This is just a big mess for philosophy in general: on the one hand we want to talk as if everyone is in System 2 mode, but we're regularly dependent on data from people's System-1-driven behavior. (What philosophers are accustomed to call our "intuitions" -- without those there's no Gettier problem, not much to talk about in ethics, linguistic evidence is worthless, etc.) That's fine-ish, but it makes collecting the System 1 data awfully confusing, or, rather, it makes it hard for the one providing the data to know if you want the gut reaction or the rationalization, and obviously most people prefer to present their rationalizations to the world. (New posters here who present only their gut instincts about everything and no rationalizations are shunned and eventually banned.)

How about the rest of here just stipulate that you can kick Chuck Norris's ass any time you like and you leave off making posts where you remind us?

Nice link. That's a handy website to know.

Their having chosen with integrity? — Isaac

Sure, if you know them and have some idea how they make decisions, then that would fall under "-- or don't because you have other reasons not to [require an explanation]." Maybe "require" is too strong a word; maybe plain old "prefer" is better, but keep in mind that "other reasons not to" covers a lot of ground. Most decisions most other people make are a matter of indifference to us.

But when we're talking about preferences (not facts), that starts to sound worryingly like a presumption of conformity. As if you owe someone an explanation just to be different. It's non-favoured for men to wear make-up, it doesn't require an explanation when they do. — Isaac

Ah, now this is nothing like what I was talking about, so I see the problem. I haven't been anywhere near describing behavior in the aggregate, just talking about individuals as individuals. The partitioning of options is purely a description of how an individual might view a field of alternatives -- and, again, nobody views every such set as partitioned, just some, for whatever reason. So I'm not at all talking about whether some behaviors where we have options (like wearing makeup, given that we're men) are "favored" by society at large or something. But your description is fine for individuals holding such a view -- and we probably could aggregate and say something like, Americans over the age of 60 presume men don't wear makeup unless they're on stage, and find deviation odd.

Because that part is right, absolutely. It's all about marking what's to count as deviation, if anything. But again I'm only talking about what an individual would consider deviant, because this thread is all about individual decisions. (Okay and because methodological individualism has some appeal for me.)



Also, maybe I should note that I'm not defending these partitioning schemes -- I introduced them as a shortcut people take to deal with the complexity of the world. It saves you from having to work up a judgment from scratch for every novel situation. It's a very System 1 approach, so what matters here is its general utility and cost-effectiveness. You will miss a lot of nuance, but you avoid a lot of complexity; and when you have reason to think you've made a mistake, you just bump the question up to System 2. To put it in the common lingo, such partitioning schemes clearly fall under the heading of "biases and heuristics".

but people apparently aren't going to just say — Isaac

I'm not sure people always can articulate the reasons for their decisions. Besides, the friendly neuroscientists down the hall will remind us that whatever they say is an after-the-fact story their brain made up when pressed, a rationalization.

Speak for yourself. I'm a pretty simple guy.

For Husserl, the phenomenon is a complex entity composed of my intention projecting forward into the world and the world pushing back on my intention by acting both as a constraint and an affordance. — Joshs

Can I keep the part that sounds like biology and ignore the part that sounds like ontology? Everything after "complex entity composed of" is dandy, or anyhow good enough, but the first part of the sentence is just there to keep the philosophers quiet.

I did think of a way that might do some of what's wanted: if you imagine objects in a grid of however-many dimensions, and each dimension is a way of classifying them, then changing which direction you look at the grid from would change which classifications were visible to you, like a projection, dropping out now this classification, now that. (You can do this kind of silliness with SQL databases and Excel spreadsheets too.)

As for bats and such, we can get pretty far falling back on metaphor, can't we? We can talk about sonar or magnetic field perception as if it's a kind of sight. (I heard an interview with a neuroscientist who learned how to "see" heat by wearing a sensor that stimulated the skin with vibrations to indicate temperatures.)

I suppose the important question is where representational and symbolic thought come into this. Insofar as that's unique to humans, I'm okay with talking about some uniquely human way of thinking we do involuntarily. But maybe symbolic thought is built up out of elements you might find elsewhere. In which case, maybe the "human perspective" is unique only in the way it marshals other forms of thought, forms we might be able to split off and examine at least analytically, if not in fact.

Just babbling, sorry, but I would love to see a little hesitation before each word in a phrase like "human perspective", just in case we don't even know what that's supposed to mean.

Not sure I get this. Does unable to understand really mean unable to approve? — Isaac

I think so. What would you be approving of? But again, someone choosing the non-favored option only means you require some explanation -- or don't because you have other reasons not to.

A little expansion on the partition idea, which I find useful pretty often: if you have a set of options {a, b, c, d}, you can take that as-is and choose between them, or you can designate a default and partition the options into two sets. If the default is a, then you get {a, not-a, not-a, not-a}; if it's not-b, and substituting for clarity, you get {ok, not ok, ok, ok}.

Your whisky and brandy example might be just be a matter of taste rather than "How could anyone possibly like brandy? Anyone who says they do is a poseur."

The scientists can only tell us what the facts are, not what we ought to do about them. — Isaac

Fair point. But in some cases the scientist is wearing a public health hat with the lab coat, so I grandfather them in.

I've only just read you saying that indirect realism about patterns is 'horseshit' — Isaac

Heh. I'm trying to be okay with indirect realism, but there's an armchair version of it that still rubs me the wrong way.

it's a question, not an avoidance strategy — Isaac

Also a fair point. It still seems like a long way around to me: if your critique of my position is solid, then it is, even if you're wrong about lots of other stuff. If the meat-eater's response is just "I really like steak and I've never understood why people smoke" then it's his premises and his weighting of them you'll have to take issue with, because he's perfectly consistent.

I can't say as I'd heard many other options. — Isaac

Maybe there isn't a single premise everyone shares that carries more weight than all their other preferences put together. Maybe what we're looking at here is more of a "family resemblance" situation, lots of overlap and so on, but not one single most important thread.

it's not one of the far too many many Kant threads. — unenlightened

Sorry, I'll try to behave myself.

Btw, I'm still not clear on the thesis we're all ignoring

Because to recognise a pattern is to simplify, and it is the thing that science and philosophy and literature and music all lean towards; the making sense of complexity and its subsumption into a pattern. — unenlightened

if only because it seems more natural to me to think that everything works this way, so philosophy does too.

((Extra data point: Herbert Simon used to argue there's no such thing as intuition, only pattern recognition. A chess grandmaster seems, to the beginner, to have intuition because he has orders of magnitude more positions and patterns stored away and he recognizes them.))

Given that order is a relation between two things, what sense does it make to say order is intrinsic to two things, one of which is not an observer sufficiently intelligent enough to estimate it? — Mww

I don't see where intelligence comes into it, unless the definition is very broad indeed. I would have thought something like sensitivity or responsiveness is enough. A tree grows into a gap where it receives more sunlight and away from an area permanently in shadow. There is something here, some relation between the tree and its environment generally, and between the tree and the sun, as a unique part of its environment, something quite predictable, a pattern, a kind of order. Are you inclined to ascribe this pattern to the tree's intelligence? Or to mine for noticing?

"But the world corresponds to them!" is the cry. No, the world doesn't, not ever. Except of course as it seems to - but that is all a matter of mind. All the resemblances, repetitions, patterns, are abstractions from the world as a matter of idea by a mind. The efficacy of all of which a testimony to the power of mind. — tim wood

And again, what does "mind" do here that sensitivity or responsiveness can't? A tree grows as it does because of the effect of sunlight on chlorophyll (or something like that), not sunlight in the entirety of its being, not each photon as a numerically distinct individual (if it is). Things respond to each other "abstractly", in the sense that only certain aspects are relevant, only certain aspects responded to. What matters is that when the thing does this or is this kind of thing, I do that. A tree is toppled by a boulder tumbling downhill in much the same way it's toppled by a car tumbling downhill; only the mass and rigidity of the object striking the tree is relevant. The color of the car is irrelevant. The exact mineral composition of the boulder is irrelevant. Abstraction, in this simple sense of selective sensitivity, is not a property only of mind.

my preference for whiskey would explain why I'm drinking one right now, your preference for brandy would explain why you're not (but rather are having a brandy), but your preference for brandy wouldn't explain why you think my drinking a whiskey is wrong. — Isaac

Indeed. But the world's a complicated place, so we take shortcuts.

Your differing taste might leave another unable to understand your action. "Ugh. How can you drink that stuff!" Unable to understand means unable to approve. This isn't just a matter of taste though; the selection here of "not drinking whiskey" as the default behavior -- this is the shortcut, the partitioning of the alternatives by naming a "favored term" -- only means I'll need an explanation to understand your choice.

It's clear enough that for many of the people you've interacted with here, getting vaccinated is seen as the default. Your choice is hard to understand; I expect your explanations have persuaded some you've made a reasonable decision, just not all. For me, your explanations have gotten me roughly to the middle -- still not sure you've made the right choice, but not sure you've made the wrong one either.

Having brought them up, however, I would be interested in what your preferences are, if you've a mind to say. What factors would you consider apart from health risk/benefit[/]? — Isaac

Ah. Not sure, honestly. I don't have a lot of opinions one way or another about medicine and the use of pharmaceuticals. I know the industry is a horror show, as most multi-billion-dollar industries are, but I've been pleased to have ibuprofen in my life, and I know there are cases where drugs have saved people and cases when they're an obscene money-grab.

I'm rather strongly pro-science, in a vague way, so if men and women in lab coats hold press conferences and tell me they think I ought to do something, I'll need reasons not to, or at least excuses, maybe rationalizations will do. This is, sadly, a tribal matter here in the United States now, especially where I live, in the Deep South, and it is perhaps hard to understand if you don't live here. This may be why it seemed natural to me to compare getting vaccinated to voting -- simultaneously civic-minded and tribe-supporting -- a comparison that may not have the same resonance with you.

But the other part of what you've been up to could be summarized, only a little uncharitably, like this:

((S)) I don't want to get vaccinated and you can't say boo to me about it because other people smoke and eat red meat.

If I held a position that could be summarized thus, warning bells would be going off that I had made some kind of mistake somewhere. — Srap Tasmaner

Could you explain why? — Isaac

Well, it's a non sequitur, for starters, so we'd have to add some premises to get it looking like an inference. I don't like the look of what we'd have to add, though: that's a lot of individuals with their own reasons and given their own circumstances. If I ignore all that, my conclusions are probably worthless; not ignoring it introduces lots and lots of variables. Doesn't strike me as a good opportunity for generalizing.

And then there's what we'd be adding if we proceed: the goal is to compare what someone says about one thing with what they say about another. Even if I'm careful, and do the work, do I get anything better than plain "whataboutism"?

It's hard to put my finger on why -- evidence, as a matter of fact, that this impression is mistaken -- but it just doesn't feel like reasoning to me at all. It feels more "associative" than inferential.

You've provided a gloss, so let's look at that.

the main thread is the threshold of acceptable risk to your community's health services. I don't suppose anyone has something like a number in mind, but a rough idea of what is and is not acceptable. I expect a degree of consistency, and I don't think that's all that odd. — Isaac

Right off the bat, I'm uncomfortable. You've made a choice about how to classify people's views; it's not a bad choice, but there's no reason to think it's their choice. That doesn't always matter, but explicitly here we're supposed to be interested in why people say one thing and another, and you've decided for them why they're saying what they do.

We'd find it odd if someone who smoked like a chimney started complaining about the burden on the health service caused by meat-eaters. You'd find that odd no? — Isaac

No, not if by "odd" you meant "surprising". (I know by "odd" you mean "irrational", but I don't want to touch that.) Add the right premise or premises and their views might be perfectly consistent. (No guarantees, of course; sometimes people do reason poorly.) There are people in the United States who won't get vaccinated precisely because the federal government and the pointy-headed scientists want them to; the problem here is not their inconsistency, and that's what we're supposed to be interested in.

People who take a reasonably large risk of burdening their health services are complaining about those taking a smaller risk. I'm trying to find out why. — Isaac

Obviously because they have other beliefs informing their views. Is that so strange? If you didn't have preferences against getting vaccinated, this might have been a matter of indifference to you. You might have flipped a coin.

I don't have a solution for you. You can evaluate another's views using their criteria, and they'll pretty often pass that test; you only catch the occasional faulty inference that way. Or you can evaluate another's views using your criteria, but what's the point in saying that if someone thought like you they'd agree with you? There doesn't seem to be much percentage in doing either. If the exercise is to have any point at all, it has to start by settling on shared criteria, our criteria. Insofar as people haven't done that with you, they've wasted their time and yours. Insofar as you haven't done that with them, you've wasted your time and theirs. What else is there to say?

from Chinese culture, an example comes to mind, which is the principle of ‘li’, derived from ‘the grain in wood’. It suggests a quality of naturalness or spontaneity which is esteemed in Chinese art. But it’s not a repeating pattern - unlike for example the patterned motifs you find in Greek pottery or Islamic architecture. So it’s not really a pattern, but still a principle, if that distinction can be made. — Wayfarer

That's really lovely, and very on point because that "spontaneity" you mention, that's chance under another name. And yet woodgrain is an excellent example of some kind of pattern, just a pattern that incorporates chance within certain constraints (or now and then overflows those constraints in ways which are in turn somewhat predictable), which feels very, very close to the sort of thing I was attempting to describe. Lovely idea.

Epsitemically, there's no final settling down to either "this is patterned" or "this isn't". You've no way to know that a pattern you perceive will continue as it has up until now. (Hume says hi.) But when a pattern you've been following breaks, how could you possibly know whether the break is "genuinely" stochastic or itself part of a larger pattern? For that matter, there could be pattern anywhere you don't perceive it, or anywhere you do but not the one you think. In short, you cannot know whether you can predict anything, meaning both: can't know that you can, can't know that you can't. So we predict, defeasibly.

Aprokrisis would have a whole metaphysical lecture about this, but I'm not inclined to fill in for him.

I'll only say that it's hardly a surprise that there is this sort of oscillation. It is what you'd expect in an experimental system driven by feedback, evolving and incorporating and growing. Of course we keep finding patterns and of course they keep breaking and of course we keep finding new patterns.

Is it ironic if I've already started repeating myself?

I prefer risks from external elements to risks from things I did to myself), I don't want to support the pharmaceutical industry, I don't like prophylactic medicine in general. — Isaac

Reverse some of those and see if an inclination to get vaccinated, simply as a matter of preference, appears, notwithstanding any of someone's other views about risk. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm afraid I can't make sense of this paragraph. — Isaac

Sorry, yes, that's one of those sentences that makes sense in your head...

What I meant was this: suppose I did not avoid but preferred risks that were of my own choosing; or suppose I wanted to support the pharmaceutical industry; or suppose I generally approved of prophylactic medicine. Any such preference might even trump other views I have about risk in general, or about the risks of covid and vaccination in particular. But without knowing about those preferences, you might be hard pressed to make sense of my views -- that was the point.

If it's a lack of charitable interpretation that's bothering you, there's a list of posts ahead of mine need addressing. — Isaac

True, but yours are worth addressing.

To get from your stated preferences (about risk and medicine generally) to refusing vaccination is straightforward; the only critique you might be open to there would be if there is some additional premise or premises, which you either already accept or could be brought to accept, which would lead to a different conclusion. This may or may not be the case, but would be the usual sort of discussion.

But the other part of what you've been up to could be summarized, only a little uncharitably, like this:

I don't want to get vaccinated and you can't say boo to me about it because other people smoke and eat red meat.

If I held a position that could be summarized thus, warning bells would be going off that I had made some kind of mistake somewhere. This part is not a bad argument; it's just no argument at all, but somehow you came to believe it is. (I'm very interested in how that might happen.)

I'm sure on your side it all seems to hang together in mutual support, perfectly neat and consistent. But from my side, there's a crazy patchwork of argument and obiter dicta with the actual structure obscured by a tangle of threads connecting everything to everything else.

Sure, I know how the argument works. I also know "perspective" and "point-of-view" have been metaphored to mean all sorts of things.

I was just wondering if there's anything in the argument that would actually justify using the "perspective" metaphor if it weren't already to hand.

This might serve as an example: objects closer to you appear larger in your visual field than those farther away -- art-class perspective. You could metaphorically extend perspective to include the value people place on things by also metaphorically extending (visual) size to stand in for value -- a bit like the way a word cloud shows words in sizes that (approximately) preserve the proportions of their frequencies within a corpus.

I just can't quite come up with anything like that for, well, all of reality. So we have this "perspective" metaphor, but I don't know what it means.

I have a vague memory of Wittgenstein's mentioning templates. All perception being a matter of the template laid over reality by the observer. — tim wood

I hope he didn't say that because I've been feeling somewhat kindly toward LW lately and I have a strong allergic reaction to that idea.

I think it's the suggestion -- in the versions I've seen of it around here over the years, mostly third-hand Kant, I guess -- that the template is arbitrary, that either we cooked it up without reference to reality or it just fell from the sky somehow. And thus the only word for what we do to reality with it is "impose". We "impose" on reality our belief in space, in time, in the permanence of objects, and so on. And we could just as well have "imposed" some other conceptual scheme "on" reality, even an incommensurable one, as they say.

I think that's all horseshit. We don't impose anything. Reality isn't out there and our conceptual scheme over here in a drawer full of conceptual schemes. We are part of reality, organisms embedded in an environment, and a conceptual scheme is what evolves through continued interaction of the two and untold layers of feedback.

Because to recognise a pattern is to simplify, and it is the thing that science and philosophy and literature and music all lean towards; the making sense of complexity and its subsumption into a pattern.

It is the very substance of the faculty of understanding, and the whole basis of prediction. It is surely what big brains are evolved to do. — unenlightened

Two other ways of putting this come to mind, each of which has a sort of icky loop in it:

(1) Patterns aren't found in real things, but in abstractions, the real things considered only in certain of their various aspects. Which aspects? Well, um, the aspects that are relevant for ... the pattern.

(2) A pattern is something that repeats, something that goes on, something we can extrapolate the rest of given the first bit. We can predict because there's a pattern. How do we know there's a pattern? Well, um, because we can ... predict.

But those loops are only icky if you were hoping for a static, crystalline, logically structured universe. If you're cool with something more dynamic, more interactive, something with feedback loops, something evolution could get ahold of, then not icky at all but just what we were looking for. Or expected. Whichever.

How could we apprehend the world from a non human, non biological perspective? — Amalac

If you and I stand a ways apart, and between us there's a red car and a blue car, the red car closer to me and the blue closer to you, from my perspective the blue car is behind the red car and from yours the red car is behind the blue car. Which is true?

Obviously both are true, because "behind" only makes sense given a particular perspective. Insofar as the plain statements, "B is behind R" or "R is behind B" appear to contradict each other, it is only because each statement carries presuppositions that have not been made explicit. Rather than being contradictory, they turn out to be not only equally true but equivalent once you've made those presuppositions explicit. (If from this side B is behind R, then it had better be true that from the other side R is behind B.)

There can be bad angles -- I'm thinking of baseball, for instance, where the umpire at second base may not be able to see from his angle whether the fielder's glove is actually touching the runner's leg. From another angle it will be perfectly clear. But the umpire's might be the only perspective from which you can see whether the runner's foot was touching the bag, so to get the whole story you may have to combine the views from more than one perspective. We have no trouble doing this, because we believe the world was in exactly one state at the moment in question, and each perspective shows us some of that state.

That's all pretty boring, but it's how we usually talk about perspective, and it's how we learn to take it into account when trying to say what state the world is in. I am not a prisoner of my perspective but fairly adept at swapping it for another, imagining another, or even "factoring it out" altogether. This last can't be imagined clearly, because the mind's eye needs a perspective, but I can define and work with whatever relations are invariant over the changing of perspective.

I say all this to ask if you can connect the talk of "human" perspective to this more mundane understanding of perspective.

First things first:

I think you made your decision without any consideration of those thresholds ((i.e., the lax and ill-informed public's)) at all: — Srap Tasmaner

That's your prerogative, but it does make discussion a little difficult if you're going to replace what I say with what you think I think. — Isaac

But I'm clearly right and you said exactly that:

Why would you engage in a decision making process relying on a standard of risk it is evident you consider lax and ill-informed? — Srap Tasmaner

I haven't, I've used my own standard of risk. — Isaac

That is, without reference to the standard you don't approve of, exactly as I said.

Normally, I don't like to get into this pointless back-and-forth about who said what, but it's oddly on point here.

I expect to be judged by consistent standards. Is that something you don't think I've any cause to expect? — Isaac

So what would that be in this case?

To keep it simple, there is the Isaac standard of risk (I) and (your interpretation of) the public standard of risk (P), the one that has no problem with smoking, eating bacon, and going skiing. You have examined your decision not to be vaccinated and concluded it meets the requirements both (I) and (P).

Now what is it you want from your interlocutors here? You want them to apply (P) and find you blameless. Why should they do that? Is (P) the standard of risk of everyone you've interacted with here? Or might they have their own standards, as you have yours?

When someone balks at having words put in their mouth, you call that inconsistent.

Now to this matter of consistency. I submit that a better starting point would be to assume, for the sake of investigation, that if someone's views appear inconsistent, perhaps it is because you don't fully understand their views. (I could say very much more about this, and I am very far from suggesting that everyone's views will turn out, upon examination, to be perfectly consistent. I have my own reasons for thinking this is not so.) This is a point @Hanover used to make forcefully about liberals and conservatives in the United States, and I think he was absolutely right: liberals often see conservatives as almost bone-headedly inconsistent because they just don't understand them.

For instance, you stated some unchallenged and undefended preferences:

I prefer risks from external elements to risks from things I did to myself), I don't want to support the pharmaceutical industry, I don't like prophylactic medicine in general. — Isaac

Reverse some of those and see if an inclination to get vaccinated, simply as a matter of preference, appears, notwithstanding any of someone's other views about risk.

My overriding interest here (this forum in general, in fact, but certainly this thread), is in how people justify their beliefs — Isaac

And I just don't see that this is the course you've followed. What do you actually know about the views of anyone participating in this thread? Could you make up a short list of preferences like yours above for anyone you've argued with here? For comparison, if you had not spelled them out, would it be perfectly clear to everyone here that you held the preferences you listed above?

The point is not whether there's competing benefits, the point is that it's no one's business but mine so long as I make those choices within the thresholds we find acceptable (ie, my choices don't burden the health services more than other choices we already find acceptable). — Isaac

Do you find the burdens placed on the healthcare system by obesity, smoking, etc. -- do you find them acceptable? I know that "we" do? What about you?

Why would you engage in a decision making process relying on a standard of risk it is evident you consider lax and ill-informed? That seems kinda crazy, and I don't think you actually did that. I think you made your decision without any consideration of those thresholds at all:

It's a risk I don't want to take (I prefer risks from external elements to risks from things I did to myself), I don't want to support the pharmaceutical industry, I don't like prophylactic medicine in general. — Isaac

Having now compared your decisions to other decisions you don't approve of, but which "we" the public at large are evidently fine with, you want everyone to be fine with your decision too, and it's a bit galling that so many people evidently aren't.

Near as I can tell, your participation here has never really been about justifying your decision to us or to anyone -- you're completely qualm-free; it's been about demanding justification from those who disapprove.

Am I totally misreading the situation?

If I don't have any of the associated comorbidities, my chances of needing hospital care are tiny. — Isaac

As is the burden on you of just getting the jab or the good you might do Africa by not getting the jab. If I understand you correctly, there is almost no reason for you to get vaccinated, so almost anything on the other side is enough reason not to.

But what if you're wrong about your chances of getting very sick, or what if you're right but it happens anyway? Chances aren't guarantees. I suspect if you had the chance to explain to Prof Pollard how you had been following his work and had yourself not gotten vaccinated, he would say, "Don't be a damned fool. Get the shot."

I don't know if there's a moral issue there -- that was your question so I've gone along -- but I'll say this: the cost to you barely registers; the potential benefit to you is considerable; from a rational point of view, this isn't even a close call.

"The problem with this virus is (it is) not measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population," Professor Pollard explained during the online evidence session.

"The Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated. And that does mean that anyone who's still unvaccinated at some point will meet the virus. We don't have anything that will stop transmission, so I think we are in a situation where herd immunity is not a possibility and I suspect the virus will throw up a new variant that is even better at infecting vaccinated individuals," he said.

This was echoed by Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia and an expert in infectious diseases, who also highlighted that the current vaccines being administered are very effective in preventing severe Covid infection and death but they cannot prevent infections entirely.

"The concept of herd immunity is unachievable because we know the infection will spread in unvaccinated populations and the latest data is suggesting that two doses is probably only 50 per cent protective against infection," said Mr Hunter. — link

So eventually everyone will be exposed to the virus -- this is the becoming-endemic outcome I understand is becoming the consensus now among folks that know, yes? -- so vaccination is not to prevent transmission but to reduce severity of illness for the vaccinated individual. Your being vaccinated does not reduce the severity of my illness.

So we're back to questions like burden on the healthcare system and such, but keeping in mind now that the experts here say you will get infected eventually.

(Didn't quote the stuff about not doing boosters and sending vaccine elsewhere instead, but I noticed it.)