Our intermittent emails about it have been very helpful or very unhelpful depending partly on whether I ever finish it
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket and
Current framing: the representation/reality relationship is the CENTRAL and unsolvable problem for rationalism. Maps are highly atypical representations: the relationship is much simpler than most.
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket and
LW uses “map” instead of “representation” in order make it seem like the relationship is straightforward *in general*. That hides the central problem on which the whole story founders.
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket and
I think this is semi-deliberate: they found that thinking in terms of “maps” instead of “representations” clarified their thinking considerably, so they went with it. Indeed, it does make the story much more precise & tractable, at the cost of making it much more wrong.
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket and
The essay undermines this by pointing out the even literal maps don’t work anything like the way LW uses the word. There’s tons of nebulosity in there, not just uncertainty or imprecision. (But less nebulosity than with most representations)
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Replying to @Meaningness @drossbucket and
Maybe this idea about “entanglement” and “mutual information” could focus the criticism a bit? This seems to underpin Yudkowsky’s general conception of representation.pic.twitter.com/i0uqS3McCh
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Replying to @JakeOrthwein @Meaningness and
I only vaguely know this particular post, but 3 years ago I got the idea that EY had a coherent story on representation and I just had to work out what it was. so god help me I ended up reading a pile of sequences posts, Arbital pages and ancient pdfs...
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Replying to @drossbucket @JakeOrthwein and
... I was motivated by the fact that sometimes (as in your screenshot) he shows an understanding that representation should ground out in interaction somewhere. But exactly how he wants that to work is hugely contradictory across his writing, and sometime flat out absent...
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Replying to @drossbucket @JakeOrthwein and
this is interesting, but does one need to have an account of how exactly representation works in order to say "the map is not the territory" (i.e. particular representations can fail to be useful or accurate)?
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @drossbucket and
The problem is that the map metaphor is (deliberately?) misleading when taken as a prototype for representation in general. The ways that maps fail are dissimilar to, and much simpler than, the ways most other representations fail (when they do).
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If you think about maps instead of representations-in-general, suddenly your thinking becomes much clearer, and you feel that you’ve understood something and now have a superior epistemology, whereas exactly the opposite is the case.
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Replying to @Meaningness @s_r_constantin and
How fixed would it be if they somehow extended the metaphor and explicitly talked about cartography/mapmaking? They would have to taboo most or all pre-given ontology including bits, yes? What would they be allowed to start with?
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Replying to @meditationstuff @s_r_constantin and
Well, there’s two problems. One is that actual maps don’t work like the simplistic rationalist account of representations. The other is that maps are highly atypical as real-world representations.
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