Equally True, Equally False

Note: I am not entirely satisfied with the phrasing in this post and would be happy to hear alternate articulations.

I have noticed that many unproductive conversations involve two people arguing about a phenomenon at two different levels of analysis.

Trivial example: You tell your children to “hold still” for a photo. One of them, inevitably, responds that “it is impossible to hold still because they are above absolute zero.”

“I’m holding still,” and “I am not holding still (because I am above absolute zero),” are equally true statements in different contexts. In the context of a photograph, you are only supposed to be as still as you can be. This is understood from context; no one feels it necessary to explain that you don’t need to stop the rotation of the Earth (which carries us along at a fast clip,) the beating of your heart, or the vibration of your atoms every time a picture is desired.

In the context of grains of pollen suspended in “still” liquid, the unstoppable motion of individual atoms does need to be noted and explained, as Einstein did in 1905.

The claim that Brownian Motion prevents you from holding still for a photograph is wrong, but the claim that it prevents grains of pollen from holding still in liquid is correct. Likewise, the claim that you are holding still for a photo is correct–and the claim that the pollen is still because you are holding the water still is wrong.

The weather is hard to predict, but I can predict with great certainty that July in the northern hemisphere will be hot, and next January will be cold–and vice versa for the southern hemisphere. These are different levels.

I recently read a well-written essay that I can’t find now but would like to link to if someone has it on the difficulties of discussing pretty much anything with certain types of people.

The discussion went like this:

Ordinary person: The sky is blue.

Academic: Excuse me? Do you have a source for that claim?

Ordinary person: What? The sky is blue. Everyone knows that.

Academic: For starters, there’s no such thing as “the sky.” The solid blue dome that ancient people thought surrounded the Earth is just an illusion created by the scattering of light. If you went up there, you’d discover that there is no “sky” to bump into. You’d just keep going straight into space.

Ordinary person: You know perfectly well that the term “sky” just refers to that expanse of blue we see over us.

Academic: Do you even know about Rayleigh scattering? The “blue” color is just an illusion due to the scattering of light. At night, when there’s not enough light for Rayleigh scattering, the sky is black. Man, you need to get out more.

These two people are both correct, but they are arguing at different levels. In normal, everyday conversation, the sky is, indeed, blue. People understand you perfectly well if you say so, and people also don’t call the sky blue while stargazing or watching a beautiful sunset.

People who are studying the way air molecules scatter light, by contrast, need to talk about the color of the sky in more technical detail in order to do their jobs.

Thankfully, no one actually gets into fights over the color of the sky because most people (even small children) understand the social context of communication. The point of speech is not to Say True Things, but to be understood by another person. If the other person understands me, then my words have done their job. If the other person does not understand me, then I need to rephrase. If I insist on speaking about something at a different level from what the other person is talking about, then I am being an ass who contributes nothing of worth to the conversation. (Note that we consider a consistent pattern of such conversational dysfunction, without inability to correct it, a symptom of mental disability.)

This normally understood conversational feature breaks down under three circumstances:

1 Confusion. Sometimes when we learn something new, like “color is an illusion,” it takes us a while to reconcile the new and old pieces of information in our minds.

Science, and thus our ability to learn technical information about the world, is a very recent invention on the scale of human history. A hundred years ago, people didn’t know why the sky is blue; two hundred years ago, they didn’t know what stars are made of. They didn’t have technical answers; they only had he lower-level explanations.

So it is understandable that people, especially students, sometimes take a while to integrate new information into a coherent view of the world, and in the meanwhile respond at incorrect levels in conversation. (Nerds do this a lot.)

2 Cognitive dissonance. This is similar to confusion, but happens because people have some reason–usually political bias–for wanting a particular answer. People may be genuinely confused about colors, but no one experiences cognitive dissonance about it. People experience cognitive dissonance about questions like, “Are men and women the same?” or “Do gun restrictions save lives?”

It is much easier to invoke confused logic to support your points when you want a particular outcome for political reasons.

3 Deception. This is confusion on purpose.

There is an old story that when Denis Diderot was in Russia, visiting the court of Catherine the Great, he managed to annoy her majesty via his arguments in favor of atheism. Catherine called upon the great mathematician Leonard Euler to defend God. Euler proclaimed, “(a+b^n)/n = x, therefore God exists,” and the great but mathematically uninclined philosopher left in confusion.

The story is probably not true, but it illustrates the principle: sufficiently complicated arguments can confuse non-experts even when they are totally irrelevant. (Related: SSC post on Eulering.) Switching levels on someone is a fast and easy way to confuse them, especially if you have studied the subject more than they have.

People do this when they want a particular outcome, usually political. For example, people who want to promote trans rights will recount an array of technical, medical intersex conditions in order to claim that the biological categories of “male” and “female” don’t exist. Of course, the biological categories of “male” and “female” do exist, as do people with rare genetic disorders; the one does not disprove the other, and neither tells you what to do about anything trans-related.

I feel like there needs to be some efficient (and recognized) way of saying, “Yes, this is true, but on a different level from the one I am addressing. At the level I am addressing, this is false.”

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The Idiocy of Categoric Purity

I realized yesterday that the Left has an odd idea of “purity” that underlies many of their otherwise inexplicable, reality-rejecting claims.

The left has, perhaps unconsciously, adopted the idea that if groups of things within a particular category exist, the groups must be totally independent and not overlap at all.

In the case of genetics, they think that for a genetic group to “exist” and be “real”, it must hail from a single, pure, founding population with no subsequent mixing with other groups. We see this in a recently headline from the BBC: Is this the last of the Aryans? 

Deep in India’s Ladakh region live the Aryans, perhaps the last generation of pure-blooded people and holders of possibly the only untampered gene pool left in the world.

These actually-called-Aryans might be fabulous, interesting people, but there is no way they are more pure and “untampered” than the rest of us. The entire sub-headline is nonsense, because all non-Africans (and some Africans) have Neanderthal DNA. They aren’t even pure Homo sapiens! Africans btw have their own archaic DNA from interbreeding with another, non-Neanderthal, human species. None of us, so far as I know, is a “pure” Homo sapiens.

Besides that, the proto-Indo-European people whom these Aryans are descended from where themselves a fusion of at least two peoples, European hunter-gatherers and a so far as I know untraced steppe-people from somewhere about Ukraine.

Further, even if the Aryans settled in their little villages 4,000 years ago and have had very little contact with the outside world over that time, it is highly unlikely that they have had none.

Meanwhile, out in the rest of the world, there are plenty of other highly isolated peoples: The Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island, for example, who will kill you if you try to set foot on their island. There was a pretty famous case just last year of someone earning himself a Darwin award by trying to convert the Sentinelese.

Now let’s look at that word “untampered.” What on earth does that mean? How do you tamper with a genome? Were the rest of us victims of evil alien experiments with CRSPR, tampering with our genomes?

The Chinese might figure out how to produce “tampered” genomes soon, but the rest of us, all of us in the entire world, have “untampered” genomes.

To be honest, I am slightly flabbergasted at this author’s notion that the rest of the people in the world are walking around with “tampered” genomes because our ancestors married some Anatolian farming people 4,000 years ago.

This strange idea pops up in liberal conversations about “race”, too. Take the recent AAPA Statement on Race and Racism:

Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.

But… no one said they did. At least, not since we stopped using Noah’s sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth going their separate ways after the Flood as our explanation for why races exist.

“See, human races are’t descended from Shem, Ham, and Japheth, therefore races don’t exist!”

Two groups of things need not be completely separate, non-overlapping to nonetheless exist. “Pillows” and “cloth” contain many overlapping traits, for example; there are no traits in “cloth” that do not also exist in “pillows.”

Colin Wight on Twitter articulates this beautifully as the “Univariate Fallacy”:

1/ The modern far Left has a political agenda to destroy/deconstruct biological realities under the guise of Social Justice. A common way they go about this is by dishonestly applying univariate statistics to multivariate problems. This is called the Univariate Fallacy.

Thread. pic.twitter.com/xi1n4Xkn3s

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) May 3, 2019

Click the cube. Watch it turn.

This fallacy, when deployed, is commonly done using a single sentence buried within an article or essay couched around a broader narrative on the history of a particular type of oppression, such as sexism. Let me give you some recent examples of this fallacy in action.

You’ll remember this @nature piece arguing that sex is a spectrum and that perhaps there are more then 2 sexes, even though over 99.98% of humans can be classified at birth as being unambiguously male or female. … [Link to piece]

In this piece, they hold off deploying the Univariate Fallacy until the second-to-last sentence of a nearly 3500 word essay.

So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter.”

Please read the whole thread. It is very insightful.

For example, if you look at the so called “big five” personality traits, you find only 10% overlap between men and women. This is why it is usually pretty easy to tell if you are talking to a man or a woman. But if you you look at only one trait at a time, there’s a lot more overlap. So the trick is to take a thing with multiple facets–as most things in the real world are–and claim that because it overlaps in any of its facets with any other thing, that it does not exist. It is not pure.

Are our categories, in fact, random and arbitrary? Is there some reality beneath the categories we use to describe groups of people, like “male” and “female,” “young” and “old,” “black” and “white”? Could we just as easily have decided to use different categories, lumping humans by different criteria, like height or eye color or interest in Transformers, and found these equally valid? Should we refer to all short people as “the short race” and everyone who owns a fedora as “untouchables”?

Liberals believe that the categories came first, were decided for arbitrary or outright evil reasons, bear no relation to reality, and our belief in these categories then created them in the world because we enforced them. This is clearly articulated in the AAPA Statement on Race and Racism:

Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination. It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination. Because of that, over the last five centuries, race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world.

Race exists because evil Europeans made it, for their own evil benefit, out of the completely undifferentiated mass of humanity that existed before 1492.

This statement depends on the Univariate Fallacy discussed above–the claim that biological races don’t actually exist is 100% dependent on the UF–and a misunderstanding of the term “social construct,” a term which gets thrown around a lot despite no one understanding what it means.

I propose a different sequence of events, (with thanks to Steven Pinker in the Blank Slate for pointing it out): Reality exists, and in many cases, comes in lumps. Plants, for existence, have a lot in common with other plants. Animals have a lot in common with other animals. Humans create categories in order to talk about these lumps of things, and will keep using their categories so long as they are useful. If a category does not describe things well, it will be quickly replaced by a more effective category.

Meme theory suggests this directly–useful ideas spread faster than non-useful ideas. Useful categories get used. Useless categories get discarded. If I can’t talk about reality, then I need new words.

Sometimes, new information causes us to update our categories. For example, back before people figured out much about biology, fungi were a bit of a mystery. They clearly act like plants, but they aren’t green and they seem to grow parasitically out of dead things. Fungi were basically classed as “weird, creepy plants,” until we found out that they’re something else. It turns out that fungi are actually more closely related to humans than plants, but no one outside of a molecular biologist has any need for a category that is “humans and fungi, but not plants,” so no one uses such a category. There are, additionally, some weird plants, like venus flytraps, that show animal-like traits like predation and rapid movement, and some animals, like sponges, that look more like plants. You would not think a man crazy if he mistook a sponge for a plant, but no one looks at these examples, throws up their hands, and says, “Well, I guess plants and animals are arbitrary, socially-constructed categories and don’t exist.” No, we are all quite convinced that, despite a few cases that were confusing until modern science cleared them up, plants, animals, and fungi all actually exist–moving sponges from the “plant” category to the “animal” category didn’t discredit the entire notion of “plants” and “animals,” but instead improved our classification scheme.

Updating ideas and classification schemes slightly to make them work more efficiently as we get more information about obscure or edge cases in no way impacts the validity of the classification scheme. It just means that we’re human beings who aren’t always 100% right about everything the first time we behold it.

To summarize: reality exists, and it comes in lumps. We create words to describe it. If a word does not describe reality, it gets replaced by a superior word that does a better job of describing reality. Occasionally, we get lucky and find out more information about reality, and update our categories and words accordingly. Where a category exists and is commonly used, therefore, it most likely reflects an actual, underlying reality that existed before the world and caused it to come into existence–not the other way around.

The belief that words create reality is magical thinking and belongs over in Harry Potter and animist religion, where you can cure Yellow Fever by painting someone yellow and then washing off the paint. It’s the same childish thinking as believing that monsters can’t see you if you have a blanket over your head (because you can’t see them) or that Bloody Mary will appear in the bathroom mirror if you turn out the lights and say her name three times while spinning around.

Of course, “white privilege” is basically the “evil eye” updated for the modern age, so it’s not too surprised to find people engaged in other forms of mystical thinking, like that if you just don’t believe in race, it will cease to exist and no one will ever slaughter their neighbors again, just as no war ever happened before 1492 and Genghis Khan never went on a rampage that left 50 million people dead.

“Purity” as conceived of in these examples isn’t real. It doesn’t exist; it never existed, and outside of the simplistic explanations people thought up a few thousand years ago when they had much less information about the world, no one actually uses such definitions. The existence of different races doesn’t depend on Ham and Shem; rain doesn’t stop existing just because Zeus isn’t peeing through a sieve. In reality, men and women are different in a number of different ways that render categories like “man” and “woman” functional enough for 99.99% of your daily interactions. Racial categories like “black” and “white” reflect real-life differences between actual humans accurately enough that we find them useful terms, and the fact that humans have migrated back and forth across the planet, resulting in very interesting historical stories encoded in DNA, does not change this at all.

I’d like to wrap this up by returning to the BBC’s strange article on the Aryans:

I asked Dolma if she was excited over her daughter participating in the festival. She replied that not many outsiders came to Biama, and that it was fun to meet foreigners. But even more importantly, she couldn’t wait to see friends from neighbouring villages, brought together by each year by the festival, as well as the chance to dress up, dance and celebrate. If the future generations continue to hold traditional ceremonies and celebrations and keep their vibrant culture alive, perhaps then, they won’t be the last of the Aryans.

Source:  The Economist

One wonders what the author–or the BBC in general–thinks of efforts to keep the British pure or preserve British culture, untouched and unchanged through the millennia. Or is preserving one’s culture only for quaint foreigners whose entertaining exoticism would be ruined if they started acting and dressing just like us? What about those of us in America who think the British have a quaint and amusing culture, and would like it to stick around so we can still be entertained by it? And do the British themselves deserve any say in this, or are they eternally tainted with “impure,” “tampered” bloodlines due to the mixing of bronze-age peoples with Anglo Saxon invaders over a millennium and a half ago, and thus have no right to claim a culture or history of their own?

Goodness, what an idiotic way of looking at the world.

The Endless Ratiocination of the Dysphoric Mind

Begin

My endless inquiries made it impossible for me to achieve anything. Moreover, I get to think about my own thoughts of the situation in which I find myself. I even think that I think of it, and divide myself into an infinite retrogressive sequence of ‘I’s who consider each other. I do not know at which ‘I’ to stop as the actual, and as soon as I stop, there is indeed again an ‘I’ which stops at it. I become confused and feel giddy as if I were looking down into a bottomless abyss, and my ponderings result finally in a terrible headache. –Møller, Adventures of a Danish Student

Moller’s Adventures of a Danish Student was one of Niels Bohr’s favorite books; it reflected his own difficulties with cycles of ratiocination, in which the mind protects itself against conclusions by watching itself think.

I have noticed a tendency on the left, especially among the academic-minded, to split the individual into sets of mental twins–one who is and one who feels that it is; one who does and one who observes the doing.

Take the categories of “biological sex” and “gender.” Sex is defined as the biological condition of “producing small gametes” (male) or “producing large gametes” (female) for the purpose of sexual reproduction. Thus we can talk about male and female strawberry plants, male and female molluscs, male and female chickens, male and female Homo Sapiens.

(Indeed, the male-female binary is remarkably common across sexually reproducing plants and animals–it appears that the mathematics of a third sex simply don’t work out, unless you’re a mushroom. How exactly sex is created varies by species, which makes the stability of the sex-binary all the more remarkable.)

And for the first 299,945 years or so of our existence, most people were pretty happy dividing humanity into “men” “women” and the occasional “we’re not sure.” People didn’t understand why or how biology works, but it was a functional enough division for people.

In 1955, John Money decided we needed a new term, “gender,” to describe, as Wikipedia puts it, “the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity.” Masculinity is further defined as “a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles associated with boys and men;” we can define “femininity” similarly.

So if we put these together, we get a circular definition: gender is a range of characteristics of the attributes of males and females. Note that attributes are already characteristics. They cannot further have characteristics that are not already inherent in themselves.

But really, people invoke “gender” to speak of a sense of self, a self that reflexively looks at itself and perceives itself as possessing traits of maleness of femaleness; the thinker who must think of himself as “male” before he can act as a male. After all, you cannot walk without desiring first to move in a direction; how can you think without first knowing what it is you want to think? It is a cognitive splitting of the behavior of the whole person into two separate, distinct entities–an acting body, possessed of biological sex, and a perceiving mind, that merely perceives and “displays” gender.

But the self that looks at itself looking at itself is not real–it cannot be, for there is only one self. You can look at yourself in the mirror, but you cannot stand outside of yourself and be simultaneously yourself; there is only one you. The alternative, a fractured consciousness, is a symptom of mental disorder and treated with chlorpromazine.

Robert Oppenheimer was once diagnosed with schizophrenia–dementia praecox, as they called it then. Whether he had it or simply confused the therapist by talking about wave/particle dualities is another matter.

Then there are the myriad variants of the claim that men and women “perform femininity” or “display masculinity” or “do gender.” They do not claim that people are feminine or act masculine–such conventional phrasing assumes the existence of a unitary self that is, perceives, and acts. Rather, they posit an inner self that possesses no inherent male or female traits, for whom masculinity and femininity are only created via the interaction of their body and external expectations. In this view, women do not buy clothes because they have some inherent desire to go shopping and buy pretty things, but because society has compelled them to do so in order to comply with external notion of “what it means to be female.” The self who produces large gametes is not the self who shops.

The biological view of human behavior states that most humans engage in a variety of behaviors because similar behaviors contributed to the evolutionary success of our ancestors. We eat because ancestors who didn’t think eating was important died. We jump back when we see something that looks like a spider because ancestors who didn’t got bitten and died. We love cute things with big eyes because they look like babies because we are descended mostly from people who loved their babies.

Sometimes we do things that we don’t enjoy but rationalize will benefit us, like work for an overbearing boss or wear a burka, but most “masculine” and “feminine” behaviors fall into the category of things people do voluntarily, like “compete at sports” or “gossip with friends.” The fact that more men than women play baseball and more women than men enjoy gossiping with friends has nothing to do with an internal self attempting to perform gender roles and everything to do with the challenges ancestral humans faced in reproducing.

But whence this tendency toward ratiocination? I can criticize it as a physical mistake, but does it reflect an underlying psychological reality? Do some people really perceive themselves as a self separate from themselves, a meta-self watching the first self acting in particular manners?

Here is a study that found that folks with more cognitive flexibility tended to be more socially liberal, though economic conservatism/liberalism didn’t particularly correlate with cognitive flexibility.

I find that if I work hard, I may achieve a state of zen, an inner tranquility in which the endless narrative of thoughts coalesce for a moment and I can just be. Zen is flying down a straight road at 80 miles an hour on a motorcycle; zen is working on a math problem that consumes all of your attention; zen is dancing until you only feel the music. The opposite of zen is lying in bed at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling, thinking of all of your failures, unable to switch off your brain and fall asleep.

Dysphoria is a state of unease. Some people have gender dysphoria; a few report temporal dysphoria. It might be better defined at disconnection, a feeling of being eternally out of place. I feel a certain dysphoria every time I surface from reading some text of anthropology, walk outside, and see cars. What are these metal things? What are these straight, right-angled streets? Everything about modern society strikes me as so artificial and counter to nature that I find it deeply unsettling.

It is curious that dysphoria itself is not discussed more in the psychiatric literature. Certainly a specific form or two receives a great deal of attention, but not the general sense itself.

When things are in place, you feel tranquil and at ease; when things are out of place you agitated, always aware of the sense of crawling out of your own skin. People will try any number of things to turn off the dysphoria; a schizophrenic friend reports that enough alcohol will make the voices stop, at least for a while. Drink until your brain shuts up.

But this is only when things are out of place. Healthy people seek a balance between division and unity. Division of the self is necessary for self-criticism and improvement; people can say, then, “I did a bad thing, but I am not a bad person, so I will change my behavior and be better.” Metacognition allows people to reflect on their behavior without feeling that their self is fundamentally at threat, but too much metacognition leads to fragmentation and an inability to act.

People ultimately seek a balanced, unified sense of self.

It is said that not everyone has an inner voice, a meta-self commenting on the acting self, and some have more than one:

My previous blogs have observed that some people –women with bulimia nervosa, for example– have frequent multiple simultaneous experiences, but that multiple experience is not frequent in the general population. …

Consider inner speech. Subject experienced themselves as innerly talking to themselves in 26% of all samples, but there were large individual differences: some subjects never experienced inner speech; other subjects experienced inner speech in as many as 75% of their samples. The median percentage across subjects was 20%.

It’s hard to tell what people really experience, but certainly there is a great deal of variety in people’s internal experiences. Much of thought is not easily describable. Some people hear many voices. Some cannot form mental images:

I think the best way I can describe my aphantasia is to say that I am unaware of anything in my mind except these categories: i) direct sensory input, ii) “unheard”words that carry thoughts, iii) “unheard”music, iv) a kind of “invisible imagery”, which I can best describe as sensation of pictures that are in a sense “too faint to see”, v) emotions, and vi) thoughts which seem too “fast”to exist as words. … I see what is around me, unless my eyes are closed when all is always black. I hear, taste, smell and so forth, but I don‘t have the experience people describe of

hearing a tune or a voice in their heads. Curiously, I do frequently have a tune going around in my head, all I am lacking is the direct experience of “hearing”it.

The quoted author is, despite his lack of internal imagery, quite intelligent, with a PhD in physics.

Some cannot hear themselves think at all.

I would like to know if there is any correlation between metacognition, ratiocination, and political orientations–I have so far found a little on the subject:

We find a relationship between thinking style and political orientation and that these effects are particularly concentrated on social attitudes. We also find it harder to manipulate intuitive and reflective thinking than a number of prominent studies suggest. Priming manipulations used to induce reflection and intuition in published articles repeatedly fail in our studies. We conclude that conservatives—more specifically, social conservatives—tend to be dispositionally less reflective, social liberals tend to be dispositionally more reflective, and that the relationship between reflection and intuition and political attitudes may be more resistant to easy manipulation than existing research would suggest.

And a bit more:

… Berzonsky and Sullivan (1992) cite evidence that individuals higher in reported
self-reflection also exhibit more openness to experience, more liberal values, and more general tolerance for exploration. As noted earlier, conservatives tend to be less open to experience, more intolerant of ambiguity, and generally more reliant on self-certainty than liberals. That, coupled with the evidence reported by Berzonsky and Sullivan, strongly suggests conservatives engage in less introspective behaviors.

Following an interesting experiment looking at people’s online dating profiles, the authors conclude:

Results from our data support the hypothesis that individuals identifying
themselves as “Ultra Conservative‟ exhibit less introspection in a written passage with personal content than individuals identifying themselves as “Very Liberal‟. Individuals who reported a conservative political orientation often provided more descriptive and explanatory statements in their profile’s “About me and who I‟m looking for‟ section (e.g., “I am 62 years old and live part time in Montana” and “I enjoy hiking, fine restaurants”). In contrast, individuals who reported a liberal political orientation often provided more insightful and introspective statements in their narratives (e.g., “No regrets, that‟s what I believe in” and “My philosophy in life is to make complicated things simple”).

The ratiocination of the scientist’s mind can ultimately be stopped by delving into that most blessed of substances, reality, (or as close to it as we can get.) There is, at base, a fundamentally real thing to delve into, a thing which makes ambiguities disappear. Even a moral dilemma can be resolved with good enough data. We do not need to wander endlessly within our own thoughts; the world is here.

End