 Have you ever seen a kid screaming for hours on end about something absurd? Well, a lot of internet arguments are just like that. Only instead of being limited by the need to breathe, only character counts and finger cramps can stop them. God, the smug bastard has no idea what he's getting himself into. So, my initial motivation to start thunk was an argument I was having with my brilliant sister, who can be as stubborn as I am, about the possibility of machines that could feel emotion. I wanted to supply a sort of argumentative payload, to give her the entirety of my chain of thought all at once without being interrupted or dragged into tangents. It was an awful argument in retrospect, but I did have the foresight to build up to it in some sense, to lay some ground rules for how people should discuss these sorts of things. It's no secret that I modeled thunk off of Mike Ragnada's PBS Idea channel, which remains some of the best media ever produced for the internet. But I also have to give some credit to the vlogbrothers for creating something so casual and approachable that I thought, hey, this seems like something I might be able to do. Oh man, the book intro. I jettisoned the original thunk book in my last library purge before moving. It was some outdated medical textbook I picked up off the side of the road and wrote on with some whiteout. In retrospect, I think it says some uncomfortable things about me that the very first intro to my YouTube show prominently featured a large book that I hadn't read at all. Hi internet, my name's Josh. Today I'm going to try and show you how to argue effectively and efficiently. If you ever get frustrated by how some casual debates can spiral out of control, let me say some things. Maybe they'll help. First, it's important to recognize that what really drives and makes an argument important is differences and values. This is just transparently wrong. Arguments can be had for all source of reasons. They're just humans trying to convince each other of things by any means possible. I think what I was trying to highlight here was something like an argument between people with different sets of values is intractable in some fashion, which has a kernel of truth to it, but I didn't actually say that here. Values are just things that you care about and how much. They can be simple things like I prefer Coke to Pepsi or they can be big important sounding ideals like freedom, duty and compassion. That's important to remember because while we're generally smart enough to bear in mind that a diehard Coke fan isn't going to be convinced to like Pepsi more. When a diehard freedom fan goes up against somebody who prefers compassion, there tends to be a lot more shouting. Values are what we argue about. How we argue, or how we ought to argue, is with logic. So I started the show in a real logic bro's sort of mentality and it persisted for longer than I'm proud of. To be fair to stupid past, Josh, there's a lot of online argumentation that fails to clear the lowest possible bars of rigor or coherence, like people arguing on Facebook who have simply never been taught how to build complex ideas out of simpler parts. Still, invoking the word logic as some sort of magic that suddenly makes argument sensible, it's a pretty embarrassing moment. I say how we ought to argue because while it's easy to convince somebody that you're right by bullying them or charming them, logic allows you to convince them by making the most sense. It isn't just part of Spock's catchphrase either. Logic is an abstract system of rules, much like mathematics, that we can use to navigate from simple ideas to more complex ideas without getting lost. Formal logic can get really complex. What he means to say is, I don't actually have the famous clue about how to use formal logic. I bought a book about it and I've heard good things, but I haven't read it yet. And there are some links below if you want to learn how to use it more in depth, but today we're just going to look at something basic. A, therefore, B. You'll note that my B is a lot bigger than my A. This is because people tend to say what they think a lot louder than what they think it, and also because these are the size of letters that I could find. These letters have been on the thunk shelves from the get-go. They're cutouts from a sign that I made at work with a water jet. I do think that one thing I've been able to do fairly well with the show from the beginning is to walk through a chain of thought very slowly and methodically, not making any huge leaps that are hard to follow. I've had quite a few comments over the years that I'm good at breaking things down, and I think that that's probably why. should ban pizza. Therefore, it's a little more complicated. You know what it means generally, but in the context of logical statements, it means if you have A, then you always, always get B. Now, when someone states an opinion, they generally use more words than this, but every argument can and should be broken down into simple logical statements like A, therefore, B. Most of the time in failed debates, the people arguing don't address these statements at all. Instead of establishing what is and isn't true, they generate tons of new statements with Q's and P's and not P's trying to overwhelm their opponent with the sheer number of them. Pizza is delicious. You just haven't had the right pizza yet. You're some sort of pizza Nazi. If you're trying to argue logically, once you've broken down somebody's wall of text into individual logical statements, there are really only three things that you can disagree with in each. This isn't bad. Having a conceptual framework to categorize what sorts of things we're disagreeing about and how they relate to each other can help to rapidly hone in on a particular point of contention. Sometimes it's a fact. Sometimes it's the reasoning from those facts. Sometimes it's the reasonableness of the conclusion strong. It's very crude, but if someone had never learned anything about formal argumentation, they could do a lot worse. You can disagree with the A, the assumptions. This is usually the easiest thing to do. If pizza isn't actually unhealthy for you, then there's no reason to ban it. There might be a different reason to ban it with a different A, but the unhealthy argument would be null and void. Second, you can disagree with the therefore. If the A is actually unrelated to the B, or the B doesn't always, always follow from the A, then the argument isn't valid. For example, if banning pizza wouldn't actually make people any healthier, if instead of having pizza they just ate more fries or something, then there's no reason to ban it. It's hard to challenge a therefore. This has to do with complicated things like causality being implied and invisible, but all you have to remember is that you have to construct any anti-therefore arguments as simply as you possibly can. You should aim for simplicity regardless, but if there is any ambiguity in an anti-therefore argument, your opponent's just going to ignore you. Finally, you can disagree with the B, the results. If you show that an opponent's conclusion conflicts with their own values, then they'll dismiss it themselves. Maybe pizza is bad for you, and maybe if we banned it, people would be healthier. But do you really want to live in a world without pizza? If you think about opinions as broken down logical statements, it becomes a lot easier to find a weak point in them and knock them over like giant jingotowers of words. Also, if you construct your own argument so that your A, therefore, B is easy to see and talk about, then your opponents will tend not to disagree with you so much, or if they do disagree, their disagreements will be more relevant and more structured. You'll also find that the only persistent disagreements that you get into are differences in values, which are a lot less frustrating. Oh, you think love is more important than health? That's cool. Oh man, that pizza looks tough. My go-to recipe these days is the Bon Appetit grandma pizza with a spicy sauce. It's much better. I've put some links in the video description if you want to make it yourself. So last week, because it was my first video, and because it's apparently impossible to even search for it on YouTube. Oh man, that's right. I had no idea how YouTube worked when I started, and I made episode zero unlisted. I still only have a vague idea how it works, to be honest. Some fans have told me that I should advertise more, but to be honest, I'm a delicate flower who probably wouldn't do well if I was suddenly inundated with a more mainstream audience, like people who didn't find my channel by typing toolman argumentation into a search box. Only people that I spam directly were able to comment on it, which I'm sort of fine with. Semi I Am thinks my puncture atrocious, which they are. C-13 thinks that I'm just trying to win more arguments on the internet, which I'm not. I'm trying to lose them. And Sigmund offers some valid skepticism that intelligent conversation on the internet could be a thing. We'll see. Man, if Sigmund could only see the Thunk Discord channel now. I've put 200 episodes out into the world, and have only had a few comments that were wholly devoid of thoughtful consideration. My views have been changed by many of them, and I've seen others adopt new points of view along the way. It really feels like it's been a remarkable success, and I've made some great friends. Next week, things are going to get heady with Cartesian dualism and consciousness. I've got some links below if you want to read up on it. Blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and I'll see you then. Back when I was doing one episode a week and thought I could plan topics out in advance. Oh, you sweet summer child. Some cringey stuff in that episode, but I see some potential in there too. Trying to help people streamline and hone their discussion so they get at the meat of their disagreement quicker. I don't know who died and made me professor of rhetoric, especially without having read that book on logic, but you can probably do worse for a first video. Let's move on to episode four on privacy and surveillance. This should be fun. If you have private information that you want to keep private, just stick it in an EULA. Nobody is ever going to read it. Privacy isn't explicitly mentioned in the US Constitution, but it probably should have been. Louis Brandeis was the first US Supreme Court justice to write about privacy as a legally defensible right. In 1890, he published a paper in the Harvard Law Review with Samuel D. Warren that was simply entitled, The Right to Privacy. I remember an angry comment I got here that I was mocking people with paranoid delusional schizophrenia with a tinfoil hat. I still don't really know what I think of that. My instinct is that it's a silly comment, but I haven't asked anyone who's experienced paranoid delusional schizophrenia what they think of it. In general, I still don't have a deep intuition for what makes privacy valuable, as evidenced by the fact that I don't take painstaking measures to protect my own identity, despite having a YouTube show. It's certainly possible that someone who seriously wishes me harm will find me and ruin my life, and I'll really get it then. But here, you see a guy for whom privacy is a quaint curiosity, and I think that it shows. Now, privacy is a right was a novel concept at the time. Before Brandeis, wiretapping without a warrant was 100% legal. After all, the text of the Fourth Amendment only protects physical things like papers from being searched and seized. Not phone conversations. Brandeis looked at the text of the Fourth Amendment differently. He argued that during the time of the framing of the Constitution, the only way to know somebody's thoughts against their will was by force, intimidation, or by going through their personal effects. Brandeis insisted that the intent behind the Fourth Amendment was to protect U.S. citizens not just from the unpleasantness of interrogation, but from the invasion of their privacy by the state. Ugh, just glossed right over constitutional interpretation there. In jurisprudence, there are several competing theories about how we're supposed to enforce and interpret legal texts, like the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Brandeis was famous for asserting a broader philosophy of legal interpretation than was explicitly laid out by the text of the Constitution, saying the logic of words should yield to the logic of realities. This position is not without its criticism. By allowing judges to improvise what they feel the intent or spirit of the law ought to be, you grant individuals a lot of power to change what laws end up doing. This has advantages and disadvantages. Like, because of Brandeis, we're probably never going to see an explicit constitutional guarantee against wiretapping or email searches, which allows for all sorts of well-intentioned shenanigans by other interpreters who think that they have a good idea of what the intent of the law really is. Now, many people have different views about the extent of the right to privacy. The most common rebuttal against Brandeis' position is something called the nothing-to-hide argument, which is cited by both government intelligence agencies and suspicious parents. If you're not doing anything wrong, then why do you need privacy at all? After all, laws exist to protect and to foster people's well-being. The more that law enforcement can see what people are up to, the less of a chance of somebody getting away with criminal behavior, and thus the safer everyone will be. I don't think that anybody who has two brain cells to rub together actually believes the nothing-to-hide argument as I've laid it out here. It just crops up in subtler forms as discriminatory policy. This episode was made before the election of Donald J. Trump, which was, and continues to be, a scary time for lots of people. For a lot of my friends from other countries, the idea that they should be submitted to increased government scrutiny in the U.S. might have been a minor inconvenience under some administrations, but under Trump it was really terrifying. However, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly prohibits any arbitrary interference with a person's privacy. The question is, why is it a big deal if someone at the NSA is reading your email? The heart of Brandeis' right to privacy argument is simply that people should have the ability to determine how and to whom their thoughts and feelings are communicated, if at all. That's important for several reasons, but I'm going to focus on two. First, privacy is the last refuge for liberty. No matter how oppressive laws become, so long as you have a private place where you can do, think, and say whatever you want, that's a stronghold that even the most oppressive government can't overcome. Think about it like this, even under Stalin, if you had a truly private place, you had all of the liberties guaranteed to you by the Bill of Rights. That's freedom of religion, free speech, all of it. Okay, so setting aside the question of whether consent is the sole criterion necessary for morality, this is clearly ignoring the dangers of having a space where laws can't protect you. It's kind of the whole point of It's difficult to build a legal case against someone who performs crimes in private without leaving their victim any evidence to draw on. The best you can hope for is some independent corroboration from other victims, otherwise you're unlikely to get any sort of justice. I can't believe that I missed this. Second, privacy offers the opportunity to imagine and practice things without fear of social repercussion. Society is a structure that has evolved over a very long period of time to be very stable. That's great for people because we get to enjoy that stability in the form of things like currency and infrastructure. However, the price of that stability is that it's also awfully resistant to positive change. We'd still be living with an awful lot of terrible status close if people's lives were on display 24-7 throughout history. Education of women, drinking, recreational sex, interracial relationships, masturbation, the freedom to be Jewish or Protestant or Catholic or atheist or whatever, we owe a good portion of our freedom to do all of these things, to our ability to do them behind closed doors without our neighbors or the authorities finding out about them. This sort of ties into the cultural evolution theory I mentioned in episode 197, where individual humans are actually pretty stupid, but have a remarkable capacity to integrate cultural knowledge into their behavior. The Josh that you see here is very much of the opinion that culture and social norms are harshing his buzz, that he'd have figured out a bunch of cool new ways of behaving and interacting with the world if it weren't for everyone scowling over his shoulder. I've gotten over that. But it's a fair point that privacy lets you try out weird stuff without people yelling at you or being afraid for your sanity. I think that Brandeis gave us a gift in viewing privacy as a right unto itself. Now, the mediums have changed, but it doesn't matter if it's through g-chat or through a phone call. You should have the right to communicate your thoughts and feelings to whomever you wish without a third party finding out about them. Of course, there's also the opposite view, that if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear from government surveillance. Leave comments, let me know what you think. Oh yes, much even-handed, very equality. We've seen a few ways that this subject has changed since I made this video. There have been many obvious transgressions of privacy, like both the government and tech conglomerates collecting all sorts of information about you without your explicit consent. And everyone's been sort of fine with it? Mostly because it hasn't been an issue for most people. The right to convey your thoughts to whomever you choose in whatever fashion you wish seems very abstract and impersonal to me. Like, it's not exactly a one-to-one match of the issues I have with, like, someone reading your journal without permission. Let's check out Episode 7 on the hedonic treadmill. The players in a chess tournament recently got kicked out of a hotel. It turns out that the manager can't stand chestnuts boasting in an open foyer. Oh man, the hats. Here, one second. There we go. Iron Sprite, this is just for you. But I maintain that the hats were an incredibly mistaken attempt to be interesting. Now, when I say that I'm a fan of board games, a lot of people are going to imagine me taking a game of risk a little too seriously and back away slowly. The thing is, board gaming is a much, much, much, much, much more varied and interesting hobby than just clue and checkers in the other games that you were forced to play when the power was out when you were a kid. So you take this, Galaxy Drucker. This is a game where you and your friends have a limited amount of time to cobble together a spaceship from a pile of parts. Then you all race through the galaxy and try to survive as your ships get smashed to pieces by asteroids and attacked by pirates. It's great fun. Yeah, so this is still valid. Buying a board game for someone you love is like saying, hey, I want to spend time playing this with you. Also, I was reading that part of the script off the back of the Galaxy Trucker box because I remain incapable of memorizing a script. Tom Scott is a charming robot sent back from the far future to save us all, but he really needs to dial back the infallible delivery of 10 solid minutes. Never mind. The reason I'm showing you these is twofold. First, if you're still looking for a last minute gift idea, board games can be awesome. You can find a local game shop and ask the owner what kind of game is right for you. Second, game design might save us all. I know that sounds weird. Stick with me. First, we're going to talk about something called the hedonic treadmill. Hedonic comes from the Greek word hedony, meaning pleasure. It's the same root as hedonism, which is the philosophy that one ought to pursue pleasure above all else in one's life. The treadmill is a metaphor for how people have to do work just to stay in the same place, mood-wise. See, the human brain is really geared towards comparison. That's why you're so good at pattern recognition. You notice things that are different and tend to ignore things that are the same. That's actually quite a good illustration. Well done. The early episodes were hacked together with some open source video editing software that wasn't worth a damn, so the ability to add pictures was new and exciting here. Now it's sort of become an integral part of my presentation style, and it's a huge pain in the neck. Writing, recording, and editing the script is time consuming, but adding in and synchronizing the little pictures takes a massive amount of time. So if you have a steady stream of pleasant experiences, you need bigger and bigger highs to get the same rush of satisfaction. The same is true for pain. You know how heroin addicts have to take bigger and bigger doses as their body acclimatizes to the drug? Well, your brain does the same thing with everything, whether it's pleasurable or painful. Well, that's a vast oversimplification, but this idea plays well with the predictive processing model of cognition that I mentioned in episode 130. The idea is that the brain consists of multiple layers of Bayesian inference that each strive to reduce surprise, to eliminate noise and predictive models of the world. For example, the raw sensory data from your eyes is boiling with aberrations and glitches, but that's all sort of screened out by successive layers of filtering. If something genuinely surprising surpasses the noise-canceling threshold of these layers, it gets kicked up to higher levels of cognition and attention and more abstract models of the world. For example, people who win the lottery and people who have limbs amputated tend to report just about the same levels of happy after six months. This 1970s study is widely cited, but it only had about 50 totaled participants. Thankfully, there have been many more robust examples of hedonic adaptation since then, so it still holds water. Now that sounds crazy to us because rationally, we think that people who have a lot of money should be happier than people who have lost a leg, but that's just not how our brains work. So if we were trying to build a blueprint for a utopian future where everybody enjoyed their lives as much as possible, there is a neurological problem with just focusing on the things that we think tend to make people happy. That is to say, if we were able to somehow break through all of the barriers of limited resources and create a worldwide happiness engine that would keep everybody happy 24-7, we'd have to generate greater and greater levels of happiness just to keep pace with the hedonic treadmill. It's just not sustainable. You know, in retrospect, this is a remarkably good point with some far-reaching implications. All the arguments we have about policy are focused on easily measured phenomena, like how many people are below the poverty line, how much debt people have, who's employed or sick or whatever. But we don't really focus on the primary thing we're interested in, which is how satisfied people are with their lives and how we might make them more satisfied. All those things are just proxies for quality of life. Maybe it says something that our culture is so obsessed with money that we can't even talk about life satisfaction without invoking it. Which is why I think it's possible that game design might contain our future. I mean, game design is really the science of creating systems that are self-sustaining and rewarding, not just pleasurable. Games are balanced at the sweet spot between investment and reward. There's a definite calculus that goes into making games like World of Warcraft and Pinball fun to play. Game design itself is figuring out how to maximize that balance, so you want to invest your time and energy in the game. Gamification was a big trend in the 2000s that didn't really pan out the way we were hoping. There were a lot of half-hearted attempts to lay some thin veneer of fun on top of boring tasks without any effort invested in actually making them fun to play. Maybe if people hired actual game designers and invested resources in tuning these things to be enjoyable, it would be different. But there's always that temptation to cut corners and just hang a colorful lampshade on the torment instead. The real distinction to be made is between a rewarding experience and a pleasurable experience. Think about it, games aren't just constant streams of euphoria. When you're thinking hard about your next move or experimenting with a new strategy or watching your opponent trounce you, those things aren't fun in and of themselves, but they're part of an overall experience that is rewarding and makes you want to continue playing. Maybe that sort of architecture and the science that goes along with it is a good idea for things like economies and governments and even people's lives. Find a way to make the system exciting and fun to engage in, to make it rewarding, and people will want to play. Does game design contain the future of humanity? Leave comments, let me know what you think. Well, I think there's a lot more to unpack in the subject of the hedonic treadmill. Like I said, it's interesting that we focus so much on comparable objective correlates for well-being, but refuse to talk about the well-being itself. Maybe it makes us uncomfortable to think of a hedge fund manager with 16 houses and a personal chef being just as content as a guy living under a freeway who can only afford to eat every other day. Ethics can get hazy between justice and equality, I guess, but maybe we could stand to talk a little more about the things that make people's lives more satisfying without necessarily improving their economic or political position in the world. It's also worth noting that I still think I sort of nailed it with game design as the framework for thinking of how to make lives worth living. A finely tuned balance of effort, investment, and triumph in an endless cycle could really help some people, especially in the time of COVID. Now, let's fast forward a few years and watch episode 165 on local maxima. If you balance the 16 million upgrade on this end, I guess it would be some sort of semi-stable equilibrium. I like that intro much better. Sometimes, when I discover a new concept, I begin seeing it in all sorts of interesting places. The checkout line at the supermarket, the user interface for a certain app on my phone, it's amazing how one lens can allow you to understand so much about the world, or at least to think about it in new and helpful ways. For example, in many functions, there's an ultimate maximum value, but there may also be smaller peaks, places where if you couldn't see enough of the function, you might think we're the max. That's relatively boring as far as mathematics is concerned. But the concept of the local maximum describes many interesting phenomena, and has been bouncing around in my head recently, coloring how I think about certain things. What kind of things? Part one, algorithms. This is my much abused, hard-working robot vacuum cleaner. As you can see, he's particularly obsessed with cleaning this very small space under my cheap Ikea chair. Almost every time I run him through my apartment, he'll do a decent job tidying the entryway in the kitchen, then he'll find his way to this spot and just clean it incessantly until I come over and free him. The algorithms he uses to navigate are very simple and usually very efficient at covering the full extent of the space he has to clean, but if you feed this specific geometry into them, they just bounce around inside it aimlessly for hours. I missed that chair. Technically, this isn't a local maximum per se. The robot just performs the same set of movements over and over without regard for total floor vacuumed, but I think that it gets the point across. The space under the Ikea chair is a local maximum for the robot's navigation algorithms. The ultimate goal of the algorithms is to vacuum as much floor space as possible, and they're normally fantastic at doing that, but when they reach this location, every other direction the robot might go seems like a losing proposition compared to this tiny section of carpet. Local maximum are an issue for any software designed to maximize some variable, collectively called hill climbing algorithms because they climb the hill of a function to arrive at its peak. If you imagine a program trying to crawl along this function to get to the highest possible value, depending on how far it's willing to explore a downward trend, it may get stuck on this little hill here, failing to recognize the much larger mountain over there. Local maxima are a real problem for these sorts of search algorithms, which are used in many different fields. Software, finance, anywhere that finding the optimum or largest value of a function is useful. Speaking of which, part two, local maxima in science. Local maxima aren't restricted to the simulations that scientists sometimes use to model the universe. The same phenomenon can be observed in the universe itself. We've discussed the most well-known example of this in episode 85, evolution. There are many simple mechanisms which would be massively advantageous for any organism which managed to evolve them. Mechanisms which appear nowhere in the incredibly diverse landscape of life on this planet. The reason we don't see animals zipping around on wheels instead of legs, or plants that harvest different wavelengths of light with more energy is because evolution is a sort of hill climbing algorithm. One which has identified local maxima of survival and replication and doesn't allow wide departures from those maxima. There's actually an interesting point to be had here about the amount of genetic variation in a species and the amount of competition that it has to endure. There's very narrow ranges where you get the greatest possible sort of evolutionary development. And if you have too much genetic variation or not enough, if you have too much competition or not enough, it just doesn't work. There's no incomplete version of a wheel which is better for locomotion than a leg, even a leg that isn't very good. Any organism that develops some mutation in the direction of a wheel would suck compared to its legged brethren. It'd get hunted down faster by predators. It'd be less adept at chasing down prey or searching for sustenance. It'd likely be selected for extinction in a hot second, forced out of the game by other non-wheeled organisms, never having the time to really develop that wheel thing enough to be competitive. Another way to think about local maxima is in the context of energy and equilibria. If you flip this graph upside down, we can imagine it as a series of valleys of different depths. If you drop a ball into some terrain that looks like this, it'll roll around and eventually come to rest. It might drop to the lowest point, but it might also come to rest in this little divot. This is a semi-stable equilibrium point. If you nudge the ball a little in either direction, it'll return to this low spot. If you were to push it hard enough, however, it would find its way out of the pocket and continue on down to the lowest energy state. Heel climbing, valley rolling, local max, local min, tomato, tomata. That was an important clarification, but I don't see why I felt the need to include it here specifically. It seems a little out of place. When you start talking about energy states and equilibria, you really throw the door open to a very broad application of this idea. Physics, chemistry, just about every field has an example of a semi-stable equilibrium that has the potential to become a runaway reaction, given a hard enough push. If you think about it, everything that's flammable sort of exists in a local minimum energy state, and if you're ever brave enough to check out the Wikipedia page for false vacuum, maybe the whole universe is. It's not always a bad thing. Part three, local maxima in culture. Cumulative cultural evolution theory posits a ratchet-like hill-climbing process of culture, where good ideas are communicated through generations and honed over time, becoming more and more useful. A stochastic process with selection for adaptive traits? It's not the craziest theory I've heard. The results of cultural experimentation are passed on through tradition, transmitting centuries of trial and error in a body of custom that often goes unquestioned, sometimes persisting for long periods of time without any clear understanding of how our particular custom works, or even what it's for. Why do you hold your breath to cure hiccups? Because it raises the CO2 concentration of your blood, triggering an asphyxiation reaction which circumvents the normal diaphragm control system. We didn't even know what carbon dioxide was before the 1700s, and you probably didn't know the specific reason that holding your breath helps with hiccups, but you still do it, That's a good example. If you're a cook, you probably use a dozen such tidbits of cultural know-how every time you step into the kitchen without even thinking, from how to hold a knife to salting pasta water. Do it wrong, and you're apt to get an earful from whoever's nearby about the proper way to do things. As with our other examples, cultures are prone to local maxima. Traditions and memes that have long outlived their usefulness but continue to reward compliance and punish deviation. Just about everyone agrees that it would be better for the US to transition to the metric system, yet doing so would cost some very rich companies a lot of money and annoy a lot of crotchety people. So, here we are. We can imagine how amazing it would be for the whole world to use the same standard units and fasteners and everything else. We can envision how simple and wonderful it would be, but to get there, it would have to get worse before it got better, so it's not going to happen. I'm not so sure about that these days. I work for a company that has begun eliminating inch units from its manufacturing drawings, because nobody who does manufacturing uses inches anymore. If the US gives up on trying to compete in manufacturing, it'll be a sad day for sure, but at least we can console ourselves by throwing all of our 832 and 440 screws into the scrap metal bin. Part four, local maxima in human psychology. Some say that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it, but the reality of the situation is actually much less rosy. Even those who study history manage to screw up in very much the same ways as their predecessors. It's well and good to be a free thinker. We need people to question the prevailing cultural wisdom regardless of the stigma associated with being a deviant. But trying to work everything out from first principles isn't just a question of reinventing the wheel. It incurs the risk of falling into well trodden local maxima of human psychology. Self-reinforcing ideologies that are shaped in a way attractive to the human psyche that we've only managed to escape with a great deal of collective hard work and careful consideration. That is, this is a cute illustration mechanism of culture. Reject the prevailing cultural wisdom and well, I have a particular act to grind against first principles thinking, and it was part of what made cultural evolution theory so attractive to me. Nerds like me are prone to imagining that they're smart enough to think up better ideas than their cultural norms, which inevitably leads to doubling down on stupid ideas that have already been tried and found wanting. I've had to fight hard to get some reasonable humility about my own intelligence, and seeing other nerds make the same mistakes that I made is a humiliating reminder of all that smoke superiority that interfered with my ability to listen and learn. Also, I've been falling deeper down a pragmatist epistemology rabbit hole recently, and the idea that there are first principles to begin with is, well, it's not a given. Flat Earth conspiracy theories have gained quite a following in recent years, and have been roundly mocked for holding backwards beliefs. But reading the Flat Earth Society's wiki, it seems that those who subscribe to the idea see themselves as free-thinking skeptics, valuing experimental evidence and careful considerations of facts that are available, refusing to accept the unthinking cultural dogma of around Earth when they clearly see evidence of the contrary. Racists and sexists retrace the same longest proven arguments about supposedly fundamental differences between types of humans, convinced that they're just asking hard questions that are too spicy for today's easily offended PC culture, even though those ideas lost scientific credibility decades ago. Anti-vaxxers refuse to accept the prevailing medical consensus and raise the alarm that vaccines may cause autism again and again, demanding that someone in the scientific community rigorously investigate the effects of so many vaccinations on children. You know, like the hundreds of studies which have found no such link, but you know, this time for real. The trick is, these are self-reinforcing paradigms. They provide seemingly intuitive explanations for phenomena and discount more commonplace explanations as myths for unthinking sheeple. When you've found a whole cluster of beliefs that seem to reinforce and validate each other, alternate explanations will automatically fail in comparison because they can't address every facet of the paradigm simultaneously. If you're trying to convince someone that the Earth is round, merely showing them a video of a rocket launch isn't sufficient. They have defensible reasons to doubt that evidence, lenses distort images, and it doesn't explain any of the other reasons that they believe, the deviation in flight path of Flight UA 270, the result of the Bedford level experiment, or their subjective experience of a seemingly flat planet. This is also termed double counting at maximum. You have to explain all these phenomena better than the flat Earth paradigm, all at once. And to be honest, people don't usually afford the attention span necessary to get pushed towards a higher global maximum. If you refuse to trust the wisdom of the crowd pulling you that direction, it's technically possible you'll find something even higher. Maybe your hill climbing algorithm really is better than cultures. Maybe trying to reason from first principles will shake you loose at the errors of your ancestors. Or maybe you'll get stranded on a local maximum that culture has tried before and surpassed, vacuuming over the same square of carpet over and over. At least he seems happy. Both culture and individuals can get stuck in local maxima and there's no real way of knowing if we've found our way to the truth or just up. What examples of local maxima can you think of? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Man, that's just fallibilism all over, isn't it? I'm sure that the pragmatists and critical rationalists were just waiting for me at the top of some local maximum saying, yeah, dude, welcome to the party. Not a bad episode. I owe a lot to Scott Alexander's famous Meditations on Malik essay for shaping my thinking about this subject. But weirdly, I didn't get into any of the political or economic implications of local maxima, how companies in capitalism are hill climbing algorithms that are seeking a local maximum, which isn't really human well-being, but close enough that we're content to let them work even if we have to sacrifice some human well-being in the process. I actually had someone write to me because they were worried about the false vacuum thing, and I tried my best to reassure them that it's pretty unlikely. All right, on to episode 187. F*** new ones. People get on my case for not having a hard and fast rule for when I should wear a sweater and when I shouldn't. I mean, it's a matter of degrees. One of the persistent themes of thunk besides an unhealthy obsession with Star Trek the next generation has been to point out some of the complexities of ideas that are usually understood as irreducible or monolithic. Philosophy is one of the topics that obviously fits this bill, but we've also examined some of the nuances of rational thought, design, engineering, all sorts of stuff. We get a lot of interesting and enriching insight out of analyzing the machinery that's ticking away under and around these concepts. So when I bring up a paper with a title like this, I'm sure that at least a few of you might react somewhere on the order of who would. So I'm a fairly profane guy in real life, and it was a conscious decision to keep that sort of language out of thunk, just in case anyone wanted to use it in a classroom setting or to explain a concept without worrying about ruffling any administrative feathers. It's funny because many of my favorite teachers have dropped F-bombs in the middle of a lecture or something, but I understand why it's not the norm. Okay, relax. We're not giving up on any of that stuff. We're going to qualify it. It's pretty clear that Kieran Healy intended to turn some heads with this paper, and given that his ultimate goal is a recalibration of his field of sociology, it's not a bad strategy to be a little inflammatory. We're going to cover some of his arguments against what he sees as a scourge of vacuous clamoring for additional nuance in that field. But to be honest, I think his points can be expanded without issue to some other fields, including some that we've covered here in an excruciatingly nuanced fashion. And they might serve as a helpful rubric for how to approach the process of dissecting ideas without getting lost in an endless hall of mirrors of exceptions and provisos. I'm going to try and tease a more general principle out of his extremely entertaining writing. Please just read the paper. Healy's target isn't really nuance itself. He's very clear that it's just a feature of the landscape of sociology, sometimes useful, sometimes not. The problem that he's addressing is a rise in demands for additional nuance in any theory, every theory, for its own sake, untethered from any justifiable connection to the actual contents of the theory in question. It's trivial for anyone to listen to any carefully thought out model of human societies and say, Well, that's well and good. But aren't things a little more complicated than that? Or aren't you leaving some important aspect of the world out without the slightest amount of thought invested in how those questions actually bear relevance to the subject material, whether it's helpful to know the answers, or whether it's remotely possible for even the most diligent researcher to find the answers. Part of the problem is that, unlike other harder sciences, sociology is messy because human societies are messy. For starters, there's no singular discipline of sociological study with well established standards and research paradigms. There's a diverse mattering of methods and measures, a bunch of conflicting values and norms about how to go about analyzing the insane complexity of human communities. If you ask for a more nuanced, fleshed out version of a theory of physics or genetics or something, that's a well defined request. If you ask for the same thing in sociology, it could be anything. Another issue is the very nature of abstraction necessary for creating sociological theories requires leaving a bunch of stuff out, which invites a trivial critique. Why don't we add them back in? This is a great point, and it's the reason that I did a whole episode on this paper. The point of a model or theory is usefulness, allowing the person wielding it to make successful inferences and predictions. Poking holes in a theory is trivial compared to building one, but it's a necessary evil to ensure that the theory works, or to figure out its effective domain and the limits of that domain. Calling for more nuance in theories can make them more useful if they're so obtuse or myopic that they can't be used effectively, but it can also make them less useful if it adds unnecessary details just for the sake of completeness. You can use a term like honor cultures to mark out some interesting similarities between societies in Japan and the Middle East, but in the process of creating this abstract category that focuses on a particular aspect of how people live in those cultures, you're leaving out so much stuff. Differences in politics, economics, class, gender roles, all kinds of things. Those things are definitely important. There's volumes upon volumes written on them, but the temptation to add them back into the analysis of honor cultures is misguided. Add them all back in, and we've deluded the theory past the point of being useful or predictive or explanatory or anything of this sort. All we're giving is a one-to-one description of the societies in question. Japan is like this, the Middle East is like that. There was a reason we were talking about both of them, but hell if I can remember why. This plays into Healy's first critique of unbounded demands for nuance, on the grounds that the process of abstraction is necessary to have any theories at all, and reflexively asking for nuance is essentially asking to dissolve the theory in favor of a brute empirical description. He also notes that while it's very easy to say something like, well, how does class play into this, the reality of what sort of data gathering and analysis you'd need to respond in any meaningful way is a task for several well-funded research departments over a couple of decades, unless you can make a meaningful connection between that concept and the theory's subjects yourself, just saying x is important and your theory should address it is an impossible request to increase scope without any demonstrable benefit besides saying now it addresses race two. Adding these additional vectors of analysis willy-nilly also runs the risk of overfitting the theory to the particular societies it's built around, as we've discussed. This isn't as convincing a point for me, but I'm not the one trying to secure research funding. Now, obviously the accuracy and explanatory power of a theory are most important for evaluating its merit, and the issues that arbitrary demands for nuance raise for that endeavor are most important to diffuse, but there are some other fluffier aspects that are also degraded by those demands. We don't usually talk about the aesthetics of models, but there's something valuable about finding a compelling way of looking at the world, something that sticks in people's minds and rewards their attention. Beauty, elegance. Healy suggests something like interestingness as a good measure. It's true that there's some aesthetic value to a very nuanced theory, but acting like that's the only thing that has any value? Well, have you ever met anyone who can't enjoy a basic ass mac and cheese or a fun action romp because they aren't nuanced enough? Basically that. Again, this is a criterion that is considerably less important than a theory's accuracy, but if adding nuance doesn't make it any more predictive and in fact makes it impossibly boring. Shout out to my episode on aesthetic obligation here. If two theories are of equivalent predictive power, you are duty bound to pick the prettier one. I stress the primacy of accuracy in models over and over here so people don't get the wrong idea and imagine that I'm arguing that aesthetics are more important than facts, but I think that aesthetics matter a lot more than most stem-adjacent people give them credit for. Like engineers often gripe about how designers are always asking for inefficient shapes, but a world of concrete boxes and purely functional tech would be a worse world than this one. There are also strategic considerations, decisions about how to create models that will have the greatest impact. It's well and good to formulate a neat and correct theory, but if the result is that it gets published and subsequently forgotten, you probably shouldn't have bothered. Nuanced takes can be very impactful, but asking to plaster some nuance onto a theory for its own sake probably isn't going to make the theory more complete and influential as a result. Healy cites the incredibly far-reaching success of economic theories, which are often cartoonish caricatures of human decision-making, but still manage to influence totally unrelated fields, like child-breeding and philosophy, simply because they're very powerful ideas. I've had a lot of nerds eager to use game theory to derive rules for life, and I'm not opposed to that sort of thing in principle, but I think that many are far too eager to bite unintuitive or even self-evidently incorrect bullets because they've decided to map certain behaviors onto game theory in a very specific way, without acknowledging the arbitrariness of that sort of mapping. I mean, if it works for them, great, but it seems like a habit that invites disaster. Looking at all these arguments, it's easy to get a sense why Healy might scoff at the ever-expanding call for additional nuance in sociological theories, comparing them to an invasive species that has totally taken over an ecosystem. Kudzu. His critiques also land uncomfortably close to home in a lot of the subjects that we've been dissecting here on Thunk. To be fair, the targets of our inquiries are usually well-established theories and ideas, things that tons of people know about and hold some sort of opinion on already. Obviously, we don't have to worry about exposing enough nuance that they will somehow lose influence or become less interesting. Okay, maybe that last one, if I'm being totally honest, but it's probably useful to bear in mind that by saying things aren't as simple as that, by calling to expand these ideas to incorporate or account for some important part of the world, we are in some sense being anti-theoretic. We're corroding the substrate of abstractions necessary to build something meaningful. Now, sometimes that's 100% justified. We don't have to feel bad about breaking down abstractions that are misleading or routinely compel people to make irrational decisions. A racist might have a neat little conceptual framework that falls apart when it comes in contact with genetics, and that's a good thing. But maybe we should be cautious about trying to cram the whole complexity of the world into every model that we encounter just because, just for the sake of completeness. The perfect is very often the enemy of the good. Maybe instead we should look at models of the world and rather than asking if they're nuanced enough, we should ask, are they useful? Do they lead us to make accurate predictions? Are they interesting? Do they reward investment of thought? And are they powerful? Do they change the landscape of thought in some important way? It's not a complete list, but do you find these compelling criteria? Please leave a detailed comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe, blush air, and don't stop thunking. Yeah, that's a great episode. Like I said at the beginning, I think that this is a useful qualification rather than a thunk destroying criticism or anything like that. At the very least, the exceptions are details that I've tacked on to well-known theories that are useful for defining the boundaries of where we can use them safely and where we have to start biting our nails that they might be leading us astray. Like Episode 193 on Occam's Razor. It's not like I don't use parsimony as a heuristic anymore, but I've used the law of likelihood in its place several times since I made that episode, and it's been useful for resolving some situations where parsimony alone wasn't sufficient. Anyways, it's been seven whole years of putting time and effort into doing this show every couple of weeks or so, and you know something? I'm proud of what I've made here. I've learned an incredible amount doing research for things that I want to share and developed a wonderful habit of seeking out new interesting ideas or finding new ways to apply the ideas I already have. I'm not an especially brilliant guy, but I wouldn't have nearly the breadth of knowledge that I do have without this show motivating me to stare into the depths of my own ignorance and find something fun. Speaking of motivation, I like to talk a little about the Patreon thing. There have definitely been nights where at 2 a.m. I wonder if this is really the best use of my time, if there's something else that I should be doing instead. And it's not really the money that gets me, it's the fact that people think my little rinky-dink show is worth supporting with their hard-earned cash. It blows me away every time I think about it. Patrons, thank you so much. I try not to make a big deal about it because I know not everyone has the resources to support the show financially, but it really does mean a lot to me. Also, the Discord channel has been amazing. Every time I have a wacky idea that I want feedback on or want to pick someone's brain about something, the extremely well-rounded thunk squad always has something insightful or helpful up their sleeves. It doesn't matter if it's anthropology or astronomy or AR-15s or Apache, there's always someone in the thunk bucket channel who knows something or is willing to find out. Anyways, to wrap up, I'd like to share a thought. A large part of thunk has been ideas that don't necessarily have immediate application. Like, this isn't a cooking show where you learn recipes and techniques all the time. There's just a lot of, this is interesting, or hey, check this out. It's my hope that the stuff that we cover on thunk provides new ways of looking at things, new conceptual heuristics, new patterns of thought to stow away in the mental toolbox in case it's useful. Like, I imagine cheerleaders armed with load path analysis, or some researcher bringing up natural kinds in a lab meeting, and I think of the wonderful, vibrant landscape of ideas that humans have explored and have yet to explore resonating in everything that we do. It's a charming notion. Regardless, at the bare minimum, I hope that regular thunk viewers develop a habit of curiosity, thoughtfulness, and figuring out the shape and potential value in every new idea that they come across, and looking for parallels that might be drawn to other domains where they could be useful. I know that it's done that for me. Thank you so much for watching, for sticking with me all this time. I hope that you've enjoyed this little retrospective. Please come to the Discord to chat or leave a comment below. And never stop thunking.