Category Archives: 1

Why does each genre of communication have so many characteristics? Like, there are lots of books that are all roughly the same length and have a similar style. But if you wrote a 20-page textbook in verse, I think it would be considered an improper contribution and not taken very seriously.

Grognor draws the following picture, and says that we are much more likely to err by treating two things as one than by treating one things as two, because our limited mental faculties make one thing much easier to deal with than two. He praises making distinctions as harder and more important.

The point I want to press upon you is that the situations in the top row are easier or more likely than the situations in the bottom row, due to working memory constraints. An ontology with fewer objects in it is easier to understand, so it’s relatively easy for humans to correctly identify that what they thought was two things is actually one thing, and correspondingly, to mistakenly conflate two things into one. Mutatis mutandis, it’s hard for people to notice subtle distinctions. And likewise people have low propensity to mistakenly think that one thing is two things.

I’m not convinced.

For one thing, seeing two superficially dissimilar things as the same in a useful way requires dealing with large spaces of things and characteristics. So I don’t think the difference between one and two items in the question should be a deciding factor in how computationally hard the problem is for a brain. Figuring out how a raven is like a writing desk is way harder than imagining a raven and also a writing desk.

Also, this argument doesn’t distinguish between the upfront costs of seeing one thing as two or two things as one, and the long term costs. I think there are a very large class of things where there is a substantial upfront mental effort to see two things as the same, so we don’t. You can’t just go around mistaking a field of emus for a corporate office. However if you put careful thought into it, you might find that both represent a similar game theoretic situation. And once that has been noticed, it is relatively cheap to notice again in future. If it is true that seeing two things as one is less mentally taxing than seeing them as two, then those who originally make it easy to see two disparate things as one should get credit for making this easier for others later.

Also, I think it is often much more valuable to see two things as analogous that were not than it is to distinguish two things. Distinguishing things usually means deciding that the way you were treating both of them is not quite applicable to both, and you should treat at least one differently. But if you are only noticing this now, it probably wasn’t *that* inapplicable, and now you have to come up with a new way to deal with the thing. (I don’t have examples here, and I’m probably missing other useful effects of distinguishing things, e.g. relating to understanding them.)  But treating what were previously two things as the same things means you get to port a whole bunch of things that you learned from one context into another context for free.

Grognor says that science means division. Maybe i’m biased, but I like the bits of science more that are about unifying. Physics over taxonomies. Which is perhaps just because our brains are small. But they really are.

“If you come inside, I’ll show you my etchings”, she said. She looked at him slyly. 

He didn’t want to see any etchings. But the well known implicit meaning is “if you come in, we can have sex”.

He didn’t want to have sex. But these days, talk of ‘sex’ in public places was usually understood to mean using an illicit iRotic machine together under the influence of hypercoke.

He didn’t want to go in the iRotic or use hypercoke. But since they had discussed this earlier, he knew that she knew that he knew that she didn’t either. Specifically, she had said that she was asexual, and that the most she was willing to do in that direction with anyone was smoke pot and cuddle. So she obviously meant to communicate something like, “if you come in, I will smoke pot and cuddle with you”

He didn’t want to smoke pot and cuddle. But he strongly suspected that she was the spy he was looking for, and so her invitation and the context sure made it look like once inside they might go somewhere very private and exchange important secrets.

He wasn’t in the mood for exchanging important secrets. But he knew that the spy he was looking for was a double agent, and that any apparent invitation to confidential discussion was really an invitation to get shot, inconveniently far from witnesses.

He didn’t want to be shot (though frankly this sounded better than going near an iRotic machine). However he had a concealed stunsword, and was confident that he could best her in combat.

He followed her inside carefully, hand on his weapon.

The etchings were of birds. 

He turned around to smile at her, reeling from the depth of his misunderstanding.

She shot him. 

I like this comment, from Scott Alexander:

I think there’s a general principle that once you pass dumb regulations, it’s going to make bad things happen, and then if you try to solve those bad things by passing further regulations, you’re just going to get caught in an endless trap.

So first they regulate Mylan into a monopoly on EpiPens. Then they realize that made them too expensive, so they regulate that the government gets to set the price of drugs. Then drug companies stop making EpiPens to switch to more profitable unregulated drugs, so the government has to mandate that you’re not allowed to be a drug company unless you make a certain amount of EpiPens below cost. So drug companies leave the US and headquarter overseas to avoid that law, and then the government regulates that only drug companies headquartered in America can sell drugs in America. Then cheaper foreign drugs start coming in as contraband, so the government regulates that all packages must be inspected at the border. Then drug mules ingest contraband medications into their bodies, so now everyone entering the country needs to have an X-ray…

I agree there is a principle “regulating the economy is like playing whack-a-mole”. But why is it like that?

I think of artificially changing the price being much like artificially changing the water level. You can decree that the water should be five feet lower, so you can have a nice city on the would-be continental shelf. You can build a decent wall against the tide. But water seeks out every crack and weakness, and leaks through. You will spend forever mending leak after leak, and everything will always be a bit wetter than you hoped.

Why? Because every molecule of water is being forced downwards by gravity, and so is effectively scoping out your wall and seeing if it can move downwards through the bit of wall it is right next to. That means your entire wall is being carefully examined for leak opportunities, which are being immediately exploited by the molecules that found them.

If there are holes in the wall low down, most of the water will flow through those holes and higher up holes won’t be discovered. But when you fix the lower holes and push the water level further from its equilibrium, more holes will be found.

So it is with artificially distorted prices. If bread is sold at $0.03, and people are willing to pay $3.00 for it, and there isn’t sufficient bread to go around, every person has reason to pay $0.03 for bread and sell it for $3.00. Every person has their eyes out for such opportunities. Every person is like a gravity trying to move bread up the price gradient (okay maybe like anti-gravity). If you want to avoid this, you have to guard every route through which cheap bread may flow to its natural (in the current equilibrium) expensive bread state. As soon as you fix one hole, another will be found, unless your wall is an incredible work of wallsmanship.

This is closely related to a really nice thing about markets: if the price of a thing changes, the system decentralizedly finds the best ways to respond. For instance, if you put a tax on air pollution, the people who can most cheaply reduce their air pollution will be the ones who do it, because people throughout the economy are looking for ways to reduce the quantity of air pollution for profit. Similarly, a body of water is pretty efficient at responding to bits of its surface being lower or higher, relative to say a centrally coordinated pile of blocks.