Three Things #13: Apr. 10, 2022
On abstraction, rationality, and Zen in geopolitics
My mind was all over the place this week, so this week’s topics are a bit disjoint.
Thing #1: Abstraction
An abstraction is a “meta-technology.” It’s a technology in the sense that it’s a tool that allows us to do useful things we couldn’t otherwise do. And it’s “meta” because it’s a way of encapsulating and reasoning abstractly about a thing.
I first learned about abstraction while studying computer science. It’s an extraordinarily important tool of computer science, as well as of engineering, logic, philosophy, and much else besides. It allows us to discuss or reason about a thing—a piece of code, a component of a system, an idea, an algorithm, pretty much anything—without needing to understand or reason about the details. We can take that thing for granted, as if it exists and exhibits certain properties and behaviors, and worry about the details later (or, more often, let someone else worry about them). That may not sound exciting but it’s a very, very powerful tool and it’s enabled us to conceive of and build all sorts of useful things we couldn’t otherwise build.
For one thing, abstraction allows us to build fantastically complex systems through specialization. Many of the applications we use every day, from operating systems to web browsers to blockchains, are sophisticated works of engineering that are far too complex to fit entirely into the mind of any one person. Abstraction allows different engineers and product managers, and teams thereof, to own different pieces of a project and to trust that the individual pieces will just fit together.
For another thing, abstraction allows all sorts of nice properties of systems: modularity, replaceability, reusability, upgradability, swappability, etc.. Without modularity, changing one part of the system would involve breaking many other parts, which is totally infeasible for a complex system. Modularity, enabled by abstraction, allows us to decompose a system into independent parts and reason about each part independently of the others. (I gave a talk recently on this topic in the context of modular blockchain systems, but the same ideas apply equally well to all sorts of other systems.)
Where things get really interesting is when you walk up the “ladder of abstractions” a level or two higher than you’re used to, which sort of feels like sticking your head out the top of reality and glancing at the weird stuff flying around outside. A good example of this is category theory, and non-Euclidian space and geometry. It took me a long time to get my head around this (it’s still a work in progress). We’re all aware of some basic, intuitive rules: that space is three-dimensional, that there are infinitely many points in that space that are defined by coordinates, that there is a well-defined positive distance between any two distinct points, that the distance from a point to itself is zero, etc. But where, in the real world, does this system actually apply? What if I told you that geometry as you know it doesn’t exist in reality, but that it’s actually just a helpful abstraction?
It turns out that the same set of rules can be applied not to one but in fact to many different coordinate systems. There is some notion of “platonic” Euclidean space, a concept that’s a helpful simplification and more or less works for short distances and small spaces, but it doesn’t actually exist anywhere in reality. For instance, when navigating around the globe, we must think in terms of elliptic geometry because that’s how airplanes actually fly and how ships actually sail. And relativity dictates that, in actual space (as opposed to idealized Euclidian space), we need to account for the way in which gravity causes spacetime to curve. There is no single, correct geometry. So it turns out that geometry itself, which naively feels about as concrete as a thing can get, is itself an abstraction.
It makes me wonder what else can be abstracted. Is there an abstraction of life, or consciousness? And if so, does it include, say, thinking machines? What about systems of ethics? Are right and wrong abstract concepts too? Do these ideas apply differently in different contexts? Putting it all together: would it be unethical to “kill” a “living” thinking machine? Or, to phrase the question in a more nuanced fashion, would it be unethical to give life to an unhappy thinking machine? (The answer is nonobvious and it’s a fun thought experiment.)
This line of thinking obviously gets very philosophical very quickly, and I am not a philosopher, so I’ll end here. Suffice it to say that, the more I walk down this path, the fresher and more mysterious the world feels to me.
For more: How would you answer the above thought experiment? What other examples of abstraction can you think of in everyday life?
Thing #2: Over-rationality
I recently noticed a worrisome tendency: over-rationality, or overreliance on the scientific method and quantitative analysis over intuition or feeling. Don’t get me wrong, I am a strong believer in science and when it comes to things like medicine, chemistry, or engineering, we’re probably better off using the scientific method and following approaches that are observable, rational, testable, and falsifiable. But not everything is so straightforward and intuition also has a role to play.
I’ve always found the rationalist movement and the closely-aligned Effective Altruist movement very appealing in that they try to take a rational, scientific approach to quantifying social impact or measuring objective “good.” On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense: if there are ten opportunities before me, I’d be very happy if you could tell me, on the basis of math, science, and empirical observation, which of them would let me buy the most “good” (what economists call utility) for the world per marginal dollar (or hour, or other unit of effort).
The problem is when the same scientific method is applied to something much fuzzier, something involving human feelings or behavior. I think, in a nutshell, this is the issue I have with these movements: once they have a big rationality hammer, absolutely everything looks like a nail.
I heard a good example of this on the 80,000 Hours podcast recently (which is affiliated with Effective Altruism). The argument went like this: because there’s no measurable value to learning foreign languages, we should stop teaching them to kids. The time kids spend learning Spanish, Arabic, or Chinese would be better spent learning more STEM skills.
As a lifelong language enthusiast and learner of languages, I was particularly frustrated by this recommendation. It sounds to me like exactly the sort of recommendation that would be made by someone who understands nothing about the way the world, society, or psychology actually work, and cannot get their head out of the data to see these things.
I went to a crappy public school. I studied French there for five years, and when I graduated, I would’ve been lucky to have been able to successfully order a happy meal at French McDonalds. If you had tried to measure the impact of this education quantitatively, you would’ve given me a French aptitude test and I would’ve scored quite poorly. If this is where my foreign language story ended, I’d concede that the rationalists have a point.
But this isn’t where my story ended. I went on to college where I changed gears and studied Japanese, and later Chinese (French didn’t feel foreign enough to me, and I was fed up with conjugation). I majored in East Asian Studies, studied abroad in and later moved to East Asia, and this experience brought me (and continues to bring me) a great deal of joy. It opened my mind and showed me concepts and ideas that changed how I look at the world. (A few examples: we don’t have a word for wabi-sabi, a concept that changed my perception of aesthetics. Nor do we have words for ninjo-giri, uchi-soto, honne-tatemae or amae, all of which changed how I view society, both in Japan and back home.)
These things aren’t easily measurable but they are incredibly valuable, to me and, I think, to society. Studying foreign languages is about more than learning words (and passing tests): it introduces people, especially young kids, to different ideas, concepts and foreign cultures. This is absolutely essential for the complex, international, pluralistic, diverse society we live in. And I think this can be true even if they score badly on aptitude tests.
Not everything important or valuable can be measured. This is the problem not only with Effective Altruism but also with economics and concepts like GDP. Studying music might not make kids better at math, but that’s not the point of learning to appreciate music. I, for one, don’t want to live in a world of pure STEM without any arts, culture, poetry—or foreign languages.
For more: Listen to Bryan Caplan on the 80,000 Hours podcast on “The Case Against Education.”
Thing #3: The “Very Smart” People
“Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.” - Famous Zen saying, by Seigen Ishin (青原惟信) (as translated by Alan Watts)
I was in a taxi the other day when the driver, who was Russian, said something very interesting that I’m still thinking about: “The smart people are all leaving Russia. The very smart people are moving back to Russia.” He lives abroad, and he was referring to Russians he knows who have also been living abroad but who see an opportunity to return to Russia to help “rebuild society” (his words) and to start local businesses to replace all of the Western businesses that have left or stopped operations in Russia recently (if you don’t think this is feasible, you’ve never been to China).
It reminded me of a comment that a friend had made to me a few years ago when the Brexit vote happened: “Uneducated people voted for Brexit. Educated people voted against Brexit. Very smart people voted for it.” There’s that same pattern again.
The thing that stands out to me about comments like this is their contrarian nature. They suggest that there’s a class of contrarians who see opportunity where others see crisis and chaos. To be clear, there is always opportunity in crisis.
But this idea has multiple levels. It suggests that, for everyday people, nationalism matters a lot. Everyday British people voted for Brexit, and most everyday Russians would never think of leaving Russia in spite of sanctions, social decline, and economic hardship. It also suggests that there’s a class of globalized, educated elites, the “smart people” (how “smart” they actually are is up for debate), who see themselves first and foremost as world citizens, and who are happy to abandon ship the moment something goes wrong or against their interests at home. I see these people all the time, complaining about tax policy at home, and constantly moving around the world in search of a more favorable tax jurisdiction; family, friends, and social roots be damned. (To me, this existence seems truly miserable, but to each his own.)
Finally, it suggests that there’s an “ultra elite” class of “enlightened,” contrarian opportunists who see through the appeal of “post nationalism,” who realize that nationalism really does matter, always has, and will for a long time, and who are in favor of national sovereignty and local champions to compete with the global tech giants. These are the people who get it: they’re thinking in terms of realpolitik and great power politics and very long-term trends. They understand psychology.
If you believe, as Zen practitioners do, that there is one ultimate truth, one true version of reality, then you might see attaining this truth as a process. In the beginning, you see a mundane version of reality (“mountains are mountains”). While you’re on the journey, you realize that things are in fact very different than you realized, and perhaps different than you were taught (“mountains are not mountains”). When you’ve arrived, however—when you’ve attained enlightenment, when you can see things as they really are—you can relax and appreciate things as they are (“mountains are again mountains”).
In politics, the pattern might look like: mundane truth (life in Britain sucks and the EU, and immigration, are the cause), the search for a higher truth (actually, over the long run and at the societal level, globalization is good for the UK, even if some people will hurt in the short term), and a final, “enlightened” state (the UK is the UK and it will be fine either way, but on balance, sovereignty is probably the higher cause).
For more: Look for more parallels between Zen and geopolitics 😜
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