Metamagical Themas: Sense and Society
Navigating Information, Number Numbness, and Secret Lingual Handshakes
This is a brain dump about Section Two of Hofstadter’s collection of essays - Metamagical Themas. For an introduction to the book and hyperlinks to all the sections, see HERE.
Our society does a rather poor job of making us aware of, let alone interested in, the nature of common sense, the hidden assumptions that permeate thought, the complex mechanisms of sensory perception and category systems, the will to believe, the human tendency toward gullibility, the most typical flaws in arguments, the statistical inferences we make unconsciously, the vastly different temporal and spatial scales on which one can look at the universe, the many filters through which one can perceive and conceptualize people and events, and so on… What does a carpet woven from the incomplete understandings and ignorances of five billion sentient beings look like from afar-and where is this flying carpet headed?
- Hofstader
When I started my medical training, I was under the impression that I would be exposed to some underlying truths about ‘medicine’ and how to fix, heal, and solve people’s problems. What I’ve found out, is that the truth is not that simple. Doctors have the same psychological blind spots and biases as everyone else. Healthcare as an institution is dragged down by Moloch in the same way everything in life is. And the science used to guide treatment decisions is riddled with assumptions, limitations, and narrow thinking1. This leaves me less curious about what is ‘right’, and more curious about how people end up believing what they believe. How do they weigh evidence? How (if at all) do they compensate for natural psychological biases and limitations in their worldview? What are the consequences of the delusions and confusions of millions of people being woven together into a single societal fabric at triumphed as Truth?
As with tabletop puzzles, it’s probably easiest to start on the fringes and with edge cases - namely, conspiracy theories. Likely, the mechanism of (and way to correct) convictions going off the rails in conspiratorial thinking is the same mechanism for less ‘obvious’ errors in thinking. Examples that come to mind/Hofstader goes through:
Koestler's fallacy: our general inability to see that unusual events are probable in the long run and particularly when they are unbound. Essentially, this is unconscious p-hacking.
Poor visceral understanding of statistics: How many people do you need in a room to be more than likely that 2 people share a birthday?
Limitations of intellectual understanding versus experiential understanding: Hofstader recounts a psychologist at the University of Illinois who subjected subjects to one of two conditions: 1) a “frighteningly impressive’ ‘ESP’ demonstration” that lasted 5 minutes. Afterward, he would explain how he did the majority of the trick, but leave part of it unexplained ‘as to leave you with the experience that even though you can’t explain it, it doesn’t make it supernatural’. Or 2) an hour-long anti-ESP lecture. The results? No matter how eloquent the lecture was, it simply did not have the power to convince that the experience did.
Ego-defense: Previously in this series, we touched on self-referencing viral ideas. Expanding on that theme, we can imagine an idea that plants itself as fundamental to the person’s identity. Ideas of this nature are particularly sticky. When you’ve spent 15 years fighting for The Cause, your social group all support The Cause, and your sense of self-worth relates to participation in The Cause, it is hard to see that The Cause is bad.
A confession - I have an irrational enjoyment of fringe weird history theories of the ancient past. Like pyramidology. Or the crack-pot theory that snake venom gave proto homo-sapiens mind expanding recursive thought leading to ego development and modern consciousness, and that’s why snakes are so ubiquitous across ancient cultures and their myths.2 And one of my most nostalgic movie scenes is the opening scene of the Prometheus in which ancient cave wall paintings correlate with distant galaxies and ignite a space expedition to find aliens. It all makes me abnormally excited. I bring this up because I can almost feel what it would be like to go down this rabbit hole. I can imagine a slightly divergent universe where I’m slightly less skeptical or wasn’t exposed to the right idea (or was exposed to the wrong idea) at just the right time and - BAM - I’m an Ancient Aliens fanatic. I’m not this, but the number of changes to end up there probably doesn’t have to be too many. While ancient aliens may seem ridiculous to you - we all have beliefs that fall into place due to circumstances playing with our inherent tendencies. Are you rather ‘woke’? Are you ‘conservative’? Religious? Feverently atheist? I’m just not convinced any of these rather large systems of belief are not the development of luck/environment.
And if the environment plays such a large role in what beliefs we ‘choose’, how do we choose our environment?3 Better yet - how do we choose what we allow in the environment?
Platforming
Considering Hofstare is writing in the 1980’s, I was surprised to him tackle the issue of platforming. Of course, he is referring to the issue of what ideas are presented in editorial columns of Scientific American and what studies the Skeptical Inquirer pursued. In 2023, the issue is even more relevant with podcasts and news outlets. Everyone on every side thinks COVID was handled poorly!
The paradox of platforming is that by spending time debunking or resisting an idea, you are giving it oxygen and more chances to spread and infect other people. When I think of my own field, of psychiatry, a lot of subjects come to mind. How much credence do I give the subreddit r/antipsychiatry? what about r/criticalpsychiatry? What about r/slightlylesscriticalthantheonemorecriticalthanthisone? When is it worth countering claims made against psychiatry that I disagree with, and when am I platforming? Of course, the answer is “it’s complicated and situation dependant”, but I can still see the bucket I’ve just kicked 10 feet down the road.
There is, of course, a great counterargument about free speech, challenging mainstream views in order to advance them, letting the truth speak for itself, etc. But even so, it is not just a matter of the idea itself being platformed, but some people just are really loud about their ideas. I’m jokingly a closet Buddhist, but ‘the middle way’ is not the path to enlightenment here:
This Book Needs No Title, provides a perfect example of the kind of thing I am talking about. It is a story about two boys fighting over a piece of cake. Billy says he wants it all, Sammy says they should divide it equally. An adult comes along and asks what's wrong. The boys explain, and the adult says, "You should compromise-Billy gets three quarters, Sammy one quarter." This kind of story sounds ridiculous, yet it is repeated over and over in the world, with loudmouths and bullies pushing around meeker and fairer and kinder people. The "middle position" is calculated by averaging all claims together, outrageous ones as well as sensible ones, and the louder any claim, the more it will count. Politically savvy people learn this early and make it their credo; idealists learn it late and refuse to accept it. The idealists are like Sammy, and they always get the short end of the stick.
I had a lecture on healthcare advocacy while in medical school. We were 20 minutes from the state capital with lots of opportunities to ‘advance, support, and defend the practice of medicine’. I thought it was a waste of time as I am a rather quiet-spirited person with no desire to stand in front of congressmen4 and argue about the scope of practice, budgeting allocation, etc. Why would I lobby for my profession? Lobbying feels icky and I’m just here to help people! But the older I get, the more I see how much of society is driven by people who simply are louder and irrationally more confident. If you aren't lobbying for yourself, someone else will lobby you out.
Taking it back to first principles, it seems the best thing to focus on is not what in particular to think, but how to train people how to think. Give people the tools to fight off psychological biases. Make them aware of common argument fallacies. This would make my list of mandatory-highschool-classes-that-don’t-exist list. A critical mind is critical on all fronts - from Bigfoot to political dogma.
In the spirit of exploring the ways poor sense-making impacts society, Hofstader also writes about number numbness. I conveniently have also written about this years ago in my very first post ever. At its core, number numbness is simple. We live and perceive things at human scale. On human scale, we rarely need to grasp numbers above a thousand, time beyond ~15 years, etc. Consequently, our understanding of things outside that domain is poor. I don’t have much to add from my original thoughts on this idea, so I’ll point you there. Below are two of Hofstader’s more playful examples.
Renowned cosmogonist Professor Bignumska, lecturing on the future of the universe, had just stated that in about a billion years, according to her calculations, the earth would fall into the sun in a fiery death. In the back of the auditorium a tremulous voice piped up: "Excuse me, Professor, but h-h-how long did you say it would be?" Professor Bignumska calmly replied, "About a billion years." A sigh of relief was heard. "Whew! For a minute there, I thought you'd said a million years."
John F. Kennedy enjoyed relating the following anecdote about a famous French soldier, Marshal Lyautey. One day the marshal asked his gardener to plant a row of trees of a certain rare variety in his garden the next morning. The gardener said he would gladly do so, but he cautioned the marshal that trees of this size take a century to grow to full size. "In that case," replied Lyautey, "plant them this afternoon.
Some other examples:
How many drops are in the Atlantic Ocean? My brain just hits a dead end.
How many fish are in the ocean? I don’t know where to begin.
Which are there more of: fish in the sea, or ants on the surface of the earth? Well now I’m comparing two things I’m not sure about.
How many atoms are in a blade of grass, or blades of grass on the earth? <throws hands up>
Most of these numbers are so far beyond our ordinary comprehension that it is virtually impossible to grasp, and number numbness sets in. ‘Million’ and ‘billion’ often get clumped together as ‘really big’, but they are magnitudes apart! 314,159,265,358,979 should not be thought of as similar to 271,828,182,845 in the same way that owning 1 car is a lot different than owning 1,000 cars!
Why does this matter? Quoting myself here:
Our bad mathematical intuitions and mental models have real-life implications. What does it mean that the US Federal government spends 600 billion annually on the military? What does it mean that there are 100 billion alien planets in the Milkyway galaxy, and the Milkyway is one of a 100 billion galaxies? Numbers and math aren't the most glamorous misperception to try to fix, but it is some low hanging fruit.
If you haven’t given up on humanity yet, let’s talk about default assumptions.
A default assumption is what holds true in the "simplest" or "most natural" or "most likely" possible model of whatever situation is under discussion. For example, the following riddle went around my middle school when I was 12 years old:
A father and son have a car accident and are both badly hurt. They are both taken to separate hospitals. When the boy is taken in for an operation, the surgeon (doctor) says 'I can not do the surgery because this is my son'. How is this possible?
In this case, the default assumption is to assign the sex of the surgeon as male. This is not a conscious decision. You didn’t think ‘what is the most likely plausible sex of the surgeon based on my experiences and knowledge of the demographics of physicians’. Instead, you read a sentence without pause, and your brain did the rest. In fact, you very well may not have realized you even had a default assumption until it revealed itself in a riddle like this!
Another example: I consider my wife a modern farmer. She spent her grad school days getting work boots muddy, driving combines across the field at the crack of dawn, and disappearing seasonally for the week-long planting and harvesting of her wheat fields. Yet, when we have been singing The Farmer and the Dail to our 15-month old child for the past year, neither of us blinked twice at the default assumption built into the stance progression. The farmer takes the wife, the wife takes the child, the child takes the - wait a second!5
Now obviously, using default assumptions is really useful. The world is complex and time is limited. We simply can't afford to be constantly distracted by all sorts of theoretically possible but unlikely exceptions to the general rules or models that we have built up by induction from many past experiences. When you walk downtown, it is fair to assume that the storefronts are not cardboard illusions. You don’t worry about the structural integrity of a chair when you go to sit in it. You don’t spend time carefully inspecting the granules in the salt shaker to make sure it isn’t sugar. We run on default assumptions. It is a superpower to be able to ignore the unlikely and get through a day with ease. But every now and again, this superpower leads us astray, and this seems to be particularly problematic with sexist default assumptions.
The secret generic-masculine handshake
This is not an individual-level problem, it is societal. Chinese language used to have a gender-neutral noun called ‘ta’ which meant he/she. Using this word, you could write an entire story about someone without alluding to their sex (perhaps because it wasn’t relevant). Linguistic reforms carried out in China in the mid-20th century changed this. It literally invented a word for ‘she’ and changed ‘ta’ to mean ‘he/she’ and ‘he’. This seems like a linguistic step backward! Now Chinese, like English, has a tight handshake between the generic and the masculine version of pronouns such that the default assumption in the language is masculine. This handshake creates a slippery slope. ‘To each his own.’ ‘ Every dog has his day’. ‘Man forges his destiny’. Of course, these idioms include women, but why are we using a word that can also literally refer to just men? It’s just confusing!
Consider the following: A four-man crew just died after a terrible spaceship crash.
How many women were on board? Was the phrase "four-man crew" deliberately chosen, in order to let you know that no woman was included? Or, is ‘man’ being used in that generic sense? We don’t know! Connotations slip back and forth very shiftily - particularly at the interface between two people. The Communication Chasm is wide here.
We can draw diagrams like this all day. Chairmen, congressmen, clergymen. The point is, it is all unnecessarily one-sided. The existence of the ‘heroine’ isn’t evidence of equality as long as ‘hero’ to it’s right is bolstered by the generic-benefits-from-specific effect. As Hofstader says:
If I write, "In the nineteenth century, the kings of nonsense were Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll", people will with no trouble get the message that those two men were the best of all nonsense writers at that time. But now consider what happens if I write, "The queen of twentieth-century nonsense is Gertrude Stein". The implication is unequivocal: Gertrude Stein is, among female writers of nonsense, the best. It leaves completely open her ranking relative to males. She might be way down the list! Now isn't this preposterous? Why is our language so asymmetric? This is hardly chivalry -it is utter condescension.
For the woke in the back nodding along so far - you aren’t immune either!
Another pernicious slippery slope has arisen quite recently. That is the one involving "gay" as both masculine and generic, and "Lesbian" as feminine. What is problematic here is that some people are very conscious of the problem, and refuse to use "gay" as a generic, replacing it with "gay or Lesbian" or "homosexual". (Thus there are many "Gay and Lesbian Associations".) Other people, however, have eagerly latched onto "gay" as a generic and use it freely that way, referring to "gay people", "gay men", "gay women", "gay rights", and so on. As a consequence, the word "gay" has a much broader flavor to it than does "Lesbian". What does "the San Francisco gay community" conjure up? Now replace "gay" by "Lesbian" and try again?
The takeaway here is not that someone is wrong to use default assumptions. Nor are they ‘wrong’ to use the language their upbringing gave them. But I really don’t see any benefit of the current way language is structured other than it is easy to do because I learned it that way. Sex, if you think about it, is a strange way to divide a language. And the insistence to keep it such, while convenient as the path of least resistance, is more clearly awkward when replaced by another human variable - race. Hofstader has a 5-page short story about an alternate universe where ‘white’ has come to mean ‘white’ and ‘white and black’ in the same way masculine words (he) have come to encapsulate both masculine and feminine (he/she). It’s poingnant; I’ll end with an excerpt.
What conceivable harm is there in such beloved phrases as "No white is an island", "Dog is white's best friend", or "White's inhumanity to white"?
Who would revise such classic book titles as Bronob Jacowski's The Ascent of White or Eric Steeple Bell's Whites of Mathematics? IT'S high time someone blew the whistle on all the silly prattle about revamping our language to suit the purposes of certain political fanatics.
You know what I'm talking about-those who accuse speakers of English of what they call "racism". This awkward neologism, constructed by analogy with the well-established term "sexism", does not sit well in the ears, if I may mix my metaphors. But let us grant that in our society there may be injustices here and there in the treatment of either race from time to time, and let us even grant these people their terms "racism" and "racist". How valid, however, are the claims of the self-proclaimed "black libbers", or "negrists"-those who would radically change our language in order to "liberate" us poor dupes from its supposed racist bias?
Most of the clamor, as you certainly know by now, revolves around the age-old usage of the noun "white" and words built from it, such as chairwhite, mailwhite, repairwhite, clergywhite, middlewhite, Frenchwhite, forewhite, whitepower, whiteslaughter, oneupswhiteship, straw white, whitehandle, and so on. The negrists claim that using the word "white", either on its own or as a component, to talk about all the members of the human species is somehow degrading to blacks and reinforces racism. Therefore the libbers propose that we substitute "person" everywhere where "white" now occurs. Sensitive speakers of our secretary tongue of course find this preposterous. There is great beauty to a phrase such as "All whites are created equal."
Contra to this statement may seem, empiricism is a very important breakthrough in discovering things about the world. But the publishing process and political/economic side of ‘science’ is an ugly unavoidable truth
At the very least, this was a fun read
I used to wonder why no one made an unbiased political newsletter. Hell - why not make an unbiased political news outlet and political party while we’re at it? But it’s become more and more clear to me that there is no such thing. A publication called ‘Free Press Bulletin’ or ‘The Open Mind Report’ can claim to be unbiased, but even if these publications limit themselves to literally only present facts with no commentary - how do they decide which facts to report? Which statistics to include, or not include? My hotfix is to constantly play devil’s advocate with every stance I come across. So far it’s tiring and leaves me perpetually in moral limbo.
Ahhh. We’ve come across a generic-masculine handshake in the wild!
and now as I write this I see another default assumption - the assumption that the couple is heterosexual!