3 ms·

Languages at fine granularity and narrative complexes at high granularity. Some people explicitly refer to stories as the most efficient compression mechanisms

Languages at fine granularity and narrative complexes at high granularity. Some people explicitly refer to stories as the most efficient compression mechanisms there is, by a large margin. There is a reason the Hutter prize is what it is. Which, in a supreme irony for the positivist types, rationally entails that folk tales and the Bible (gasp) are the most valuable data there is.

logicprog 3y ago
Well, not necessarily, because while it may be highly compressed data shaped by a long history, we don't know if that data is actually any good. It could be the compounded misapprehensions of all the peoples that contributed to it. Just the fact that something holds a lot of highly efficiently compressed data doesn't mean it's actually good data. You might argue that if it's old and still common today then it must have guided the people who followed it well in order to survive so long, engaging in a kind of natural selection of ideas, but the thing is that ideas can also fall prey to suboptimal equilibria and all sorts of other evolutionary weirdness and badness. Like, the success of an idea is not directly related to how good the idea actually is for the people that follow it. As long as it isn't bad enough to kill off all its followers, an idea can spread by many other means. Maybe it's better at spreading, through appealing to our baser natures or cognitive biases, maybe it's good at locking itself in through thought stopping cliches and fear of reprisal and stuff like Pascal's Wager/Roko's Basilisk. Or maybe it's really good at setting up interlocking peer pressure and network effects and social enforcement of continuing to believe it. Or maybe it's better at suppressing other ideas. Or maybe it's better at creating a group geared toward conquest or evangelism, but actually living under it sucks otherwise. Maybe it's just really beneficial to a small group of people in power and so they work really hard to spread it. Not to mention, it only had to compete against the actual ideas that existed contemporary with ut in history and were strong enough to create evolutionary pressure, so if a new idea comes along about how to organize society or whatever, we don't actually know if it will automatically win out just because it won out against other different ideas in the past. What would we think an idea is unimprovable or optimal just because it is old? The long term existence and popularity of an idea or tradition doesn't necessarily make it good at all. Would you say that the Bible's injunctions against e.g. divorce or homosexuality or women being able to teach and hold positions of authority are encoded wisdom? The most valuable data there is? I'm by no means an actual positivist, which is an incoherent position, but I am a pragmatist, and I think the only way to actually figure out if a tradition is worth anything is to look at its reasoning, its assumptions, its history, and its effects in the world.
- fatherzine 3y ago
  "we don't know if that data is actually any good" We know the data survived a narrative/biological co-evolution distributed process spanning thousands of generations over many millennia. It doesn't make it perfect, but it makes it pretty darn good with high likelihood, especially when compared with narrative complexes invented yesterday, which have yet to withstand the test of time and which show measurable signs of dysfunction. See also the Lindy effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect "the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age"
  - logicprog 3y ago
    > We know the data survived a narrative/biological co-evolution distributed process spanning thousands of generations over many millennia. It doesn't make it perfect, but it makes it pretty darn good with high likelihood, This is fallacious. Already responded to this at length. > which have yet to withstand the test of time and which show measurable signs of dysfunction. Unlike the older traditions, which manifestly have horrible dysfunctions and consequences for a lot of people in a lot of areas. Should we never try to fix and improve those failings because we "dont know what might happen"? Or is that unknown worth it to actually have a shot at really making things better? Why are we acting like we can't have a reasonable idea of how good or bad an idea is based on reasoning through the idea, why is the null hypothesis that any societal change could cause civilizational collapse when there's no evidence of that? It's like the people constantly claiming gay marriage will cause the collapse of western civilization. Also, why are we weighing the known horrors of our inherited traditions so lightly you barely even acknowledge them, so much more lightly than the vague, unknown disasters of... civil rights or gay marriage. Who knows what disasters letting women vote or have their own bank accounts or get jobs might bring! The horror! > See also the Lindy effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect "the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age" Lasts a long time =/= good.
    - vintermann 3y ago
vintermann 3y ago
Compression isn't the right way to think about it, I think. To compress, we first have to decide what's meaningful. The reason languages are so precious, is that it's deeply imprinted in them much of what their speakers considered valuable. That can give us a new perspective on and deeper understanding of the things we find valuable.

logicprog 3y ago

Well, not necessarily, because while it may be highly compressed data shaped by a long history, we don't know if that data is actually any good. It could be the compounded misapprehensions of all the peoples that contributed to it. Just the fact that something holds a lot of highly efficiently compressed data doesn't mean it's actually good data. You might argue that if it's old and still common today then it must have guided the people who followed it well in order to survive so long, engaging in a kind of natural selection of ideas, but the thing is that ideas can also fall prey to suboptimal equilibria and all sorts of other evolutionary weirdness and badness. Like, the success of an idea is not directly related to how good the idea actually is for the people that follow it. As long as it isn't bad enough to kill off all its followers, an idea can spread by many other means. Maybe it's better at spreading, through appealing to our baser natures or cognitive biases, maybe it's good at locking itself in through thought stopping cliches and fear of reprisal and stuff like Pascal's Wager/Roko's Basilisk. Or maybe it's really good at setting up interlocking peer pressure and network effects and social enforcement of continuing to believe it. Or maybe it's better at suppressing other ideas. Or maybe it's better at creating a group geared toward conquest or evangelism, but actually living under it sucks otherwise. Maybe it's just really beneficial to a small group of people in power and so they work really hard to spread it. Not to mention, it only had to compete against the actual ideas that existed contemporary with ut in history and were strong enough to create evolutionary pressure, so if a new idea comes along about how to organize society or whatever, we don't actually know if it will automatically win out just because it won out against other different ideas in the past. What would we think an idea is unimprovable or optimal just because it is old? The long term existence and popularity of an idea or tradition doesn't necessarily make it good at all. Would you say that the Bible's injunctions against e.g. divorce or homosexuality or women being able to teach and hold positions of authority are encoded wisdom? The most valuable data there is? I'm by no means an actual positivist, which is an incoherent position, but I am a pragmatist, and I think the only way to actually figure out if a tradition is worth anything is to look at its reasoning, its assumptions, its history, and its effects in the world.

fatherzine 3y ago
"we don't know if that data is actually any good" We know the data survived a narrative/biological co-evolution distributed process spanning thousands of generations over many millennia. It doesn't make it perfect, but it makes it pretty darn good with high likelihood, especially when compared with narrative complexes invented yesterday, which have yet to withstand the test of time and which show measurable signs of dysfunction. See also the Lindy effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect "the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age"
- logicprog 3y ago
  > We know the data survived a narrative/biological co-evolution distributed process spanning thousands of generations over many millennia. It doesn't make it perfect, but it makes it pretty darn good with high likelihood, This is fallacious. Already responded to this at length. > which have yet to withstand the test of time and which show measurable signs of dysfunction. Unlike the older traditions, which manifestly have horrible dysfunctions and consequences for a lot of people in a lot of areas. Should we never try to fix and improve those failings because we "dont know what might happen"? Or is that unknown worth it to actually have a shot at really making things better? Why are we acting like we can't have a reasonable idea of how good or bad an idea is based on reasoning through the idea, why is the null hypothesis that any societal change could cause civilizational collapse when there's no evidence of that? It's like the people constantly claiming gay marriage will cause the collapse of western civilization. Also, why are we weighing the known horrors of our inherited traditions so lightly you barely even acknowledge them, so much more lightly than the vague, unknown disasters of... civil rights or gay marriage. Who knows what disasters letting women vote or have their own bank accounts or get jobs might bring! The horror! > See also the Lindy effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect "the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age" Lasts a long time =/= good.
  - vintermann 3y ago

vintermann 3y ago

Compression isn't the right way to think about it, I think. To compress, we first have to decide what's meaningful. The reason languages are so precious, is that it's deeply imprinted in them much of what their speakers considered valuable. That can give us a new perspective on and deeper understanding of the things we find valuable.