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Ambiguity in Communication is Both a Feature and a Bug Summary: In 1984, Eisenberg proposed that ambiguity in communication is important and influential. This idea suggests that being too clear can limit interpretation and hinder coalition-building. Ambiguity can be used to evade accountability, but it is also a general principle of communication. Transcript: Speaker 1 It's Eisenberg in 1984 in communication monographs or something. It's this great rambling paper and this idea has been massively influential to me, but he's basically arguing that it would seem like the point of communication should be clarity, To be as clear as possible. For me to say, I mean this and you do know exactly what I mean and that's the goal and ambiguity is therefore a bad thing. He argues that actually no ambiguity is a really important thing and other people have expanded on this. Now the way I think about this is like a blend of Eisenberg and then other people who've come a bit later, but that in a lot of ways if you're trying to get let's say a coalition, you don't Want to say this is exactly what our goal is and this is what we're trying to do. You want to use vague terms so that a bunch of people can sort of map whatever they think that the goal is onto and say that's consistent. It also leads to a reduction in accountability because after you do something and someone says, you said you were going to do this and you say, nah-ah listen to what I said, it's consistent With what I did because what I said was ambiguous. So it's pernicious in a way too. It's used nefariously in a lot of ways by let's say politicians and other kinds of leaders to avoid accountability, but it's also just a general principle of communication I think.

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Adversarial instead of truth-seeking engagement is baked into so many aspects of our society Summary: Our society often relies on adversarial advocates for decision-making, but this approach doesn't lead to the truth. We need a cooperative effort where people are open to changing their minds and acknowledging different perspectives. This applies to civic organizations, legal systems, political systems, and even neighborhood associations. We tend to punish those who disagree with the established opinion, leading to a lack of pluralism. We should strive for diverse viewpoints and a cooperative search for the truth. Transcript: Speaker 1 There's a thing wrong with our society which is we have even the institutions that work reasonably well in our society are still often built around adversarial advocates in which the Idea is i will argue as passionately as possible for one side you will argue as passionately as possible for the other side we will deploy whatever resources we can rhetoric money etc And somehow we like to think that by i don't know interpolation that will arrive at the truth and that's totally not true right i mean i we know that there are lots of types of decision-making Where that's a disaster where what you need is not these two sides each of which are deliberately undercutting the other as effectively and including viciously as they can but you want Everybody to be willing to change their mind openly publicly to be willing to publicly acknowledge the point that the other person is making and you want to sense that people are cooperatively Working together toward the truth but that's not how most civic organizations work it's not how our legal system works it's not our political system works nowadays maybe there was Some golden age in the past but it did probably not it's not even how neighborhood associations work right i mean there may be some diversity in how homeowners associations work internally Although i regret to say i don't think that's usually true because they're usually very self-selected groups of people who are quite vocal but once they arrive at a decision they're Like good old-fashioned Maoist democratic centralists you know like well we represent the neighborhood and this is our monolithic opinion and if somebody shows up and says well i Live in that neighborhood but i i actually don't agree then they they get piled on and punished and if somebody says i'm an environmentalist but this environmental organization doesn't Speak for me or i belong to this racial or ethnic group but i don't necessarily agree with what the claimed representatives of that group say that group wants they get punished again A lack of pluralism but i think it's not just a lack of diversity it's this notion that the way to get make decisions is for everybody to hammer their stake as firmly into the ground as they Can

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Feeling like a speck in the wind amongst massive Societal systems Transcript: Speaker 1 I mean we have thousands of years of human history where you know since the agricultural revolution and the dawn of city-states it's just been constant change and one could argue that On a longish you know say century timescale we haven't been at equilibrium in 10,000 years what's next right how are all these nested feedback loops churning around between you know Societal structure and environmental structure to change the shape of society in the next couple hundred years Peter Turchin probably knows this better than I do but this is where I think thinking about these things at population scales rather than individual scales is it really helps me because when I think about things at the individual level like what can I do how do I live in the society right I find myself slightly distraught about like well I don't know I'm just a speck in the wind getting blown around by this maelstrom of society by trying To sort of think about the way the whole system is of all thing I can see it's not that I'm hurtling through space it's that we're all hurtling through space together in similar ways and That creates patterns that can then be identified what do you do with those patterns well then you know you get a professorship and you get to talk about it that helps sometimes

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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