Source: Facebook

SETS AND NONSENSE : THE PERCEPTION OF INFINITE SEMANTICALLY MEANINGFUL SETS IS A COGNITIVE BIAS

I have been working with computers for a long time.

Computers are very good with sets of things and teaching you how to work with them. Relational databases are even better at teaching you the algebra of sets than programming languages. Compilers are very good at teaching you about semantics.

And trying to write games that have some semblance of intelligence not immediately deducible as trivial dumb patterns. Or writing software that can produce reasonably articulate legal arguments from limited data. Or trying to represent semantic clouds of related terms teaches you something very basic about language:

That there are actually very few sentences that are not nonsense compared to the number of sentences that are sensible.

If one accumulates knowledge from many different disciplines, it becomes rapidly apparent that the number of concepts shared by these domains is limited and that the perception of vast knowledge is an illusory artifact of disciplinary methodological loading – most of which is erroneous and caused by ignorance of these greater patterns, or various forms of social and normative loading, or the natural brevity that emerges in any population over time. Worse, no small part of current language consists of loading meant to signal social position or create priestly mysticism to preserve status cues.

One of our cognitive biases is to assume when we discover something new,

Mystical statements were not false if they achieved the purpose of getting non-kin to treat each other as kin.

They may have been allegorical but they were not false. They produced the desired outcome of uniting disunited people by getting them to extend kin-trust to non-kin.

The externality produced by that allegory was pretty dangerous it turned out. But until trade became pervasive, the need to extend trust in order to trade and operate a division of labor was insufficient to produce the level of trust that religion did.

We did not become enlightened because we wanted to, but because trade required that we did. And morality could be enforced by trade and credit rather than religion which threatens ostracization and death, and law which threatens punishment. Instead the ability to consume, compete for status and mates or feel the pressure of degrading status made very granular control of moral behavior possible – for nearly everyone, at very low cost, and producing a virtuous cycle of declining prices.

While we might create very vast and highly loaded languages, the fact of the matter, is that all language is allegory to experience. There is little or nothing that cannot be expressed with a thousand words. The primary challenge is that complexity using that limited vocabulary overwhelms short term memory. So loading using complex words. Like symbols or measurements, allows us to stuff ideas into short term memory and create faster “meaning” in each other’s minds, in the three second window of our processing cycle for those who are already familiar with the topic.

In this sense, while we use complex words with heavy loading for brevity and status signaling, the concepts that we can convey require analogy to experience, and analogy to experience requires few words.

Where am I going with this?

The number if meaningful sentences is fairly small. The number if meaningful narratives has been known to be small for some time.

The need to restate narratives in the current context is high.

But the number of theories active at any time is quite small. With the illusion of large numbers a cognitive bias, and most theories merely justifications for preferences masquerading as theories.

There just aren’t that many theories. And thats in no small part because we are very good at killing theories.

We are super predators after all.