Sneer ammo: a short, clear definition of bothsidesism's fundamental error

Sneer ammo: a short, clear definition of bothsidesism's fundamental error (https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1451t42/sneer_ammo_a_short_clear_definition_of/)

posted on June 09, 2023 10:42 AM by u/SweetCherryDumplings

This is definitely not safe for work, and may be heavy for many people: the examples come from this week’s genocidal attack on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure. Timothy Snyder on Twitter shared ten short guidelines for writing about the catastrophe. #6 made me think about this Club (emphasis mine):

When a story begins with bothsidesing, readers are instructed that an object in the physical world (like a dam) is just an element of narrative. They are guided into the wrong genre (literature) right at the moment when analysis is needed. This does their minds a disservice.

This short explanation is beautiful to me. It gave me more clarity than I’ve ever had on bothsidesism. Like:

Stories can complement analysis in helpful and cute ways: “Don’t anthropomorphize LLMs, they hate that.” To err and mix up stories with analysis is human. To keep treating physical/historical/computing objects as narrative objects, repeatedly and systematically, while informing others? Sneer-worthy!

UPDATE: there’s a sneer-worthy example of bothsidesism in a comment. I took a screenshot; when those fantastic narratives flip-flop or disappear, that’s like +10 buff to sneer-worthiness. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

u/BlueSwablr 37 points at 1686315154.000000

My interpretation of what you’ve said is that rationalists, for whatever reason, are more concerned about crafting a story of a war between the AI and humanity, rather than performing any real analysis.

I risk being too generous here, but perhaps all this talk of AGI overtaking human intelligence is an expression of angst over how humanity has achieved much technological progress, but has yet to nail down fundamental, philosophical aspects of the human condition itself. I think it’s conceivable that someone mostly accustomed to thinking in terms of STEM, who hasn’t developed the tools to effectively navel-gaze would especially feel frustrated by this, and outwardly dismiss the multitudes of schools of thought that try to address it.

One of the ideas that pervades AI doomerism is that AGI will automagically derive rules about the universe faster than humans. This is an expression of frustration that the future isn’t now, and we can see them bargaining with this frustration via the Pinkerish idea that now is the best time to live in human history- it’s the best it’s ever been, so don’t feel bad about how it might be better in the future.

Maybe the rationalist desire to live forever in simulation is at heart a desire to have the time to explore human existence, rather than to indulge on cyber-soma in a digital Xanadu. Of course, I think that would be hubris- death is so central to our existence that without it, we wouldn’t be human.

ahem I mean, how bout we stop anthropomorphising these idiot rationalists, amirite?

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u/pocket-friends 12 points at 1686320067.000000

so i’d largely agree with your assessment of OPs point, but would also add that you may find it more useful if you zoom out even more and think about narratives and how they influence us in the abstract and how news presenting their own narratives, the narratives of others, and mixing it all with specific kinds of context ends up obscuring the reality of a situation. also, and this is just some side context to build on some of your points: most rationalists are ostensibly proponents of physicalism (the notion that the real world consists solely of the physical world), but they don’t actually talk or act like physicalists. instead they often argue from a PHYSICSalist standpoint — the incorrect notion that the real world consists solely of the laws of physics. this is one of the reasons they jump to the conclusions that they do, and is directly linked to what you were describing about the way this lack of knowledge/understanding bothers them. i mean, even look at steven hawkin. one of the reasons he was so interested in black holes was because their entire existence called into question all of our notions and understandings about the world and ultimately, if true, (and this is paraphrasing him roughly cause i can’t remember where the clip was from), would mean we could not have a definite history, a definitive self, and that the “i” was little more than a tool for communication. PHYSICSalims dominates materialism, disregards human experience, and it doesn’t have to. even incredibly smart people make those common mistakes.

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u/hypnosifl 10 points at 1686336997.000000

What you call PHYSICSalism sounds similar to the more widely-used term "reductionism", but that's a term that can have a variety of meanings--the wiki page cites an article from *The Oxford Companion to Philosophy* dividing its use into three broad categories: 1) Methodological reductionism -- the idea that the best way to study any system in practice is to break it down into smaller parts ultimately ending in fundamental particles, which can also include a sort of conceptual reductionism that says that if you know how to derive a system's behavior from fundamental physics, you "understand" it completely, so that higher-level categories and heuristics are seen as only having value when you lack the ability to derive everything from physics in practice. 2) Ontological reductionism -- the philosophical view that the basic physical elements of reality (particles or strings or whatever) are all that can be said to really "exist", all higher-level entities are unreal. 3) Theory reductionism -- the idea that all higher-level descriptions and heuristic "laws" are in principle derivable from fundamental physics, without any claim that this is possible in practice or that it would be the best route to understanding even if it were, and without any ontological implications. Would you apply "PHYSICSalism" to someone who believed in 3) but not either of the others? 3) definitely seems to be the default working assumption of all the natural sciences, and there's been a lot of continued success in expanding the range of higher-level behaviors explained in terms of lower level laws (explaining more and more of cell behavior in terms of biochemistry and mechanical forces for example, or explaining more and more of chemistry in terms of quantum physics), so I think there's a strong Occam's razor style case for treating it as plausible, and most of the arguments against it seem to implicitly equate it with 1) or 2).

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u/pocket-friends 9 points at 1686338710.000000

you’re exactly right. it’s a form of reductionism. i took to calling it PHYSICSalism because an article i read once on panpsychism where the author just absolutely drags these kinds of reductionists through the mud. he even briefly implies that calling them anything other than PHYSICSalists is doing everyone else a disservice because they reject the notion that they’re reductionists and have essentially been attempting to arrogate physicalism. and, yes, i would apply it to 3 as well but with a couple caveats: 1) the person leaves room for human experience, and 2) doesn’t fall into common issues with reification than they’re usually fine by me. to get a little overly involved in some navel gazing, the natural sciences don’t have to function in that way but they’re being pushed that way because of the stranglehold physics and economics has on so many aspects of our collective understandings of the world. but that’s more point of view than it is a settled fact or reality. as a result we often end in all kinds of deterministic situations due to ramifications of the reciprocal relationship between the canonical and the new wherein the new defines itself in response to the established; while, at the same time, the established rearranges itself in response to the new. this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and can even be exploited, but remaining blind to this process creates all kinds of epistemological issues. foucault talked about something similar in terms of the classical notions of wealth and it’s explicit relationship to political economy and how the whole thing is constantly constituting itself. so the point is to understand the orthodoxy without remaining blind to its processes, or limiting yourself to many of the implications present in such orthodox, or “settled” approaches because, for a lack of a better term at the moment, shit is changing constantly.

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u/da_mikeman 0 points at 1686386649.000000

I got to be honest, I’ve never read any physicist claiming anything more than a variation of 3. Everyone will say that we don’t really understand turbulence, even if we perfectly understand it’s the result of atoms moving around following basic laws. And obviously even more about sentience, the notion that we can understand it if we know all there is to know about fundamental particles and their interaction is ludicrous, even if in principle thats “all” that happens. OTOH, I would really like one of the people that scream “reductionism!” at every chance(like it’s automatically an insult or something) to explain to me what do they think they will see if they zoom into a brain cell, and then even more into its fundamental particles. Do they think they will see something more than those particles following physics laws? Do they think there are little ghosts that push around those particles in ways that are not physics? Why? What makes you think that exactly? I mean, if you really want to believe you have a magical soul that resides in the pineal gland or electrons have “experiences” or whatever then go ahead, but to ask for natural sciences to “work that way” is bizarre. Work *what* way exactly?

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u/SweetCherryDumplings 3 points at 1686395945.000000

Interesting question! I have no idea about any magical takes on this; maybe someone who uses concepts like "soul" could answer from their perspective. My (secular) attempt: When I read about reductionism, I imagine scientists who haven't yet learned enough about emergent phenomena or complexity in general, *and* don't even allow that complexity may lurk within the "unknown unknowns" of their field. Turbulence is a great example of a known unknown. I sure hope a modern physicist wouldn't claim that there's nothing to see there beyond what we already know! I tried to find an example of an unknown unknown relevant to discussions here. History of genetics comes to mind. Earlier on, many people, even established researchers, used to seek one or two genes that coded for body shape, strength, or intelligence. Now the field as a whole seems to understand that there might be hundreds or thousands of genes, in complex interactions with one another and the environment, that define many traits. If we zoom into DNA, we won't see a value for strength spelled out, unlike a "Dungeons and Dragons" character sheet. In other words, the field is growing less reductionist. Does this interpretation make sense?

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u/da_mikeman 0 points at 1686407570.000000

Honestly, not sure. I agree with the examples you gave, but it's still about emergent phenomena that we can't \*truly\* understand, even if we have the full equations for their fundamental parts. Feynman has said it best : [https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II\_41.html](https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_41.html) \------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *The main lesson to be learned from all of this is that a tremendous variety of behavior is hidden in the simple set of equations in (41.23). All the solutions are for the same equations, only with different values of R* *We have no reason to think that there are any terms missing from these equations. The only difficulty is that we do not have the mathematical power today to analyze them except for very small Reynolds numbers—that is, in the completely viscous case. That we have written an equation does not remove from the flow of fluids its charm or mystery or its surprise.* *If such variety is possible in a simple equation with only one parameter, how much more is possible with more complex equations! Perhaps the fundamental equation that describes the swirling nebulae and the condensing, revolving, and exploding stars and galaxies is just a simple equation for the hydrodynamic behavior of nearly pure hydrogen gas. Often, people in some unjustified fear of physics say you can’t write an equation for life. Well, perhaps we can. As a matter of fact, we very possibly already have the equation to a sufficient approximation when we write the equation of quantum mechanics:* *Hψ=−ℏi∂ψ∂t.* *We have just seen that the complexities of things can so easily and dramatically escape the simplicity of the equations which describe them. Unaware of the scope of simple equations, man has often concluded that nothing short of God, not mere equations, is required to explain the complexities of the world.* *We have written the equations of water flow. From experiment, we find a set of concepts and approximations to use to discuss the solution—vortex streets, turbulent wakes, boundary layers. When we have similar equations in a less familiar situation, and one for which we cannot yet experiment, we try to solve the equations in a primitive, halting, and confused way to try to determine what new qualitative features may come out, or what new qualitative forms are a consequence of the equations. Our equations for the sun, for example, as a ball of hydrogen gas, describe a sun without sunspots, without the rice-grain structure of the surface, without prominences, without coronas. Yet, all of these are really in the equations; we just haven’t found the way to get them out.* *There are those who are going to be disappointed when no life is found on other planets. Not I—I want to be reminded and delighted and surprised once again, through interplanetary exploration, with the infinite variety and novelty of phenomena that can be generated from such simple principles. The test of science is its ability to predict. Had you never visited the earth, could you predict the thunderstorms, the volcanos, the ocean waves, the auroras, and the colorful sunset? A salutary lesson it will be when we learn of all that goes on on each of those dead planets—those eight or ten balls, each agglomerated from the same dust cloud and each obeying exactly the same laws of physics.* *The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. Today we cannot see that the water flow equations contain such things as the barber pole structure of turbulence that one sees between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schrödinger’s equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality—or whether it does not. We cannot say whether something beyond it like God is needed, or not. And so we can all hold strong opinions either way.*\------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The thing is, maybe a completely new concept is needed to explain how sentience or consciousness or experience arises; actually it's pretty certain that we will need it, the same way we will need new concepts to get qualitative informations "out of equations" that we already know - turbulence, or, to stay on topic, the state of a neural network. I don't think those sort of concepts will satisfy the "non-reductionists" though. They don't seem to deal with those. I can imagine they will say "okay well this is probably very nice science and very nice math, but it's still science and math, and I don't think it explains experience". I could be wrong, but if you look at concepts like panpsychism...those are straight up \*quaint\* ways of thinking, back when people were attributing heat to "phlogiston" and the vitalists were talking about a "life force". If natural sciences still worked like that, the way our friend pocket-friends wants them to, we will still be claiming that sex results in a new person because each sperm contains a perfect-formed microscopic human, and the womb contains a certain "principle" that "quickens" the sperm. All sorts of such concepts were used to explain complex phenomena, which is understandable because people didn't yet know that the world is made of atoms that can combine in uncountable ways. No reason to use them now though.

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u/BlueSwablr 4 points at 1686393269.000000

You’ve given me some interesting things to think about- as others have said in the thread, I’ve certainly thought that rationalists are very much reductionist, but hadn’t put much effort into trying to profile their metaphysical viewpoints. Completely orthogonally, I feel like we can punch up the term “PHYSICSalist/m”. The definition makes sense, and the term you’ve come up with brings to mind “scientism,” which is a plus. It just doesn’t exactly read well, haha. A few pitches: - RE: a shoddy ripoff of physicalism: Fizzicalism, faux-sicalism, false-physicalism, pseudophysicalism - RE: only looking at the laws of physics: physics-fetishism - RE: ignoring other philosophical standpoints that might round out their beliefs: apsychism Feel free to completely disregard.

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u/pocket-friends 3 points at 1686408590.000000

if you’re interested, the article where i pulled the term breaks the situation down even more. it’s by strawson and is called, [realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism](https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/s0/Realistic-Monism---Why-Physicalism-Entails-Panpsychism-Galen-Strawson.pdf). he only capitalized the S to highlight the difference (ie physicSalism) as the difference in the root/prefix is really physical vs physics, but i didn’t think it highlighted the difference enough cause i’m dyslexic, hence my transition to all caps. strawson highlights something through that i think your replacements miss, cause it goes beyond scientism (which is also a terribly clunky word), physicSalism/PHYSICSalsim is not just a view, it’s a faith for those fake physicalists who buy the notion “that the nature of essence of all concrete reality can in principle be fully captured in the terms of physics.” finding a way to incorporate their faith into the mockery will go far in terms of combating their ridiculous notions and will undoubtedly lead to changing minds much faster than other forms of combating navel gazing with a different type of naval gazing. they’re dogmatic believers who have their own papacy and they need to be called out for it.

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u/da_mikeman 0 points at 1686465821.000000

Meh. The paper just argues that emergence in physics basically means "get complex motion patterns out of simple motion patterns" - and that stands true for everything, from turbulence, to liquidity, to forming atoms, to elementary particle "intrinsic properties" being dependent on the vibration modes of strings. It then goes to argue that the same analogy does not work for "experience", because unlike the other ones, there is no way for us to go from 'complicated motion patterns' to 'experience'. One can relatively easily understand how certain atoms have 'liquidity' or not, based entirely on whether their electrons perform a certain 'dance'. There is no 'dance' that neurons do inside the brain that, if shown to you, you will say "oh yes, now i can see why this dance results in 'i see green' and this other dance results in 'i see green'". All that is fine and true. I certainly understand what is being said here. Except all this might just be the result of the way our brains work. For starters, we have very little idea what we actually mean when we say 'experience'. Second, it's not like we can make our neurons perform a certain dance and then see if it that results in 'experience' or 'not'. Is it possible that there could be another species, in another planet, that could re-arrange its 'brain matter' at will, and say 'yes, i see how this gives you the experience of seeing red' or 'yes, i see how this gives you the experience of smelling dark matter' or 'huh, well this doesn't give me any experience at all"? We certainly cannot imagine how it would be possible to 'see' the connection between the dance your neurons do and the experience they produce, but it still is a heck of a lot easier to imagine that there are other living things, with brains, who experience...well, experience, in much more well-defined and fine-grained way, than to imagine that electrons have 'proto-experience'. Now, we may have a very ill-defined notion of experience, but we certainly know \*parts\* of it, or rather, the mechanical parts necessary for experience to arise. For example, for any definition of 'experience' that makes sense, the object must have a means of obtaining information from the thing that triggers the experience, and also an internal structure that receives that info and re-arranges itself in a certain manner, that mirrors that thing. The ability to receive info may be by-passed if one can re-arrange that internal structure directly(for example blind people that can see colors if you stimulate their neurons), but not the internal structure itself. Can you imagine something with no internal structure, that can be re-arranged into a kind of low-res image of the world, 'experience' anything? Is there any reason to believe such a thing even happens? All the objects that we know have experience, and all the ones we are pretty sure that they do, have internal structure - well actually, they all have brains. The reason that saying 'electrons have proto-experience' sounds ridiculous is not because they are 'small', but because, as far as we know, they have no structure. And if we find some day that they do, that doesn't solve the problem, that will just push the problem further down and now we will claim that the hypothetical electron bits have 'experience'. And as an aside, this has nothing to do with any natural science that we know of. I fail to see how all this debate would do any good to anyone that tries to fine a cure for Alzheimer's, or building a particle accelerator, or inventing a new material. Even if we assume that electrons have 'proto-experience', that's still a completely useless information for anything having to do with the world we live in. At best, you made a logical argument that you feel closed the gap between "non-P" and "P", and that satisfied that part of your brain that is nagged by the feeling that there \*is\* a gap. Fine, whatever. Beyond that...nothing. So when you say 'natural sciences do not have to be done this way', you have to explain what you mean exactly. How would you want them to be done? Those 'fake physicalists' should be mocked into changing their minds into...what? Should people at LHC start considering sending positive vibes to their electron beams? Should cancer researchers start singing to healthy cells? Should we consider the possibility that 'proto-experience' might solve quantum gravity? What it is, precisely, that you want to be done? Besides debates about 'experience' that go on forever, are never really resolved, and after we are done talking about them, everyone, from the the most hands-on experimentalist to the most abstract-minded mathematician, goes on with their day and does their job as usual, how do you want their methodology to change? Into \*what\*?

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u/pocket-friends 0 points at 1686491213.000000

i bring up the paper solely for the criticisms at the beginning to tie them back to the previous points i had made about narratives and how blind even the smartest people can be to experience due to their reductionistic views. a clarification of sorts. it was more a discussion of social functions than a call for some specific method or answer, so your returned navel gazing is off topic and, as you said, meh. as for the on topic question about dogmatic people needing mocked out of their reductionistic ways, where they go is of no consequence to me, the point was more to challenge dogmatism and ideological constraints.

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u/da_mikeman 0 points at 1686503978.000000

Yeah but see, those are just some assertions you are making. “Blind reductionist ideologists”, blah blah blah. Or maybe the view that electrons have “experience” has little merit and is of no use to anyone. Not everyone that doesn’t accept your fringe ideas that you plucked out of nowhere is an “ideologue”. You have to actually make the argument for your case, I’m afraid. And when you say, “where they go is of no consequence to me”…yeah. I don’t think you’ve thought this through enough. Or maybe you actually do want the next time you visit the hospital for the doctors to try to sooth your electrons with positive vibrations, idk. In that case…

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u/pocket-friends 0 points at 1686504663.000000

wait, do you think i’m trying to make an argument for panpsychism? cause i’m not. i was building off the topic of narratives and how they relate to manufactured context in “bothsidesism” then added the bit about PHYSICSalism to highlight how things op, and the commenter i responded to initially, related to reductionism in a rhetorical sense when it comes to many of the rationalists discussed here.

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u/da_mikeman 0 points at 1686505501.000000

Then I guess I don’t really see what point is being made here. The rationalists are committing the same “sin” that is always committed when one sees accusation of “scientism” or “reductionism” being thrown around - assuming your simplistic model is enough to describe complex phenomena when it is not, like someone trying to predict the weather by treating clouds as point masses. That does not mean there is not a physical model that can predict weather. Most physicalists(or physicSalists) will argue themselves that the model rationalists use to predict the evolution of AI is extremely simplistic, and things are much, much more complex, without that meaning that they fall outside the domain of science. So again, not sure what is the point youre making.

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u/pocket-friends 0 points at 1686508524.000000

i don’t think you’re understanding me. hell we might not actually even be talking to one another about the same thing. but that’s alright. there’s more to understanding than being understood.

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u/SweetCherryDumplings 3 points at 1686393448.000000

>...perhaps all this talk of AGI overtaking human intelligence is an expression of angst over how humanity has achieved much technological progress, but has yet to nail down fundamental, philosophical aspects of the human condition itself. Awesome description of naive storytelling! Thank you. "My angst is real, so my narrative must be, too" comes next. When people first begin writing their own stories, it might take a while to adjust to the powerful psychological effects of fiction-writing. STEM work involves intense feelings, like any other field, but their range and scope differ from storytelling feelings. One could be caught unawares. In fiction writing, it feels like your story's characters come alive. You can almost hear their voices. They talk and act as if on their own, and rebel against your writing plans. It seems like the story's settings are so vivid that you could reach out and touch. An action scene is a little video you can replay in your head. And the shape of the unfolding story arc - what the story is really all about - rings incredibly true, like some deeper wisdom beyond any peer-reviewed paper you've ever read. These could be lovely, productive, and even therapeutic feelings, if managed well. That's why most young children pretend-play. Ideally, more experienced writers in the community will provide psychological mentoring and emotional education to newbie writers. Dealing with emotions in one's craft is a skill like any other, and humans can learn. Until authors demonstrate they learned to un-suspend their disbelief and re-engage their analytic minds at the end of their intense storytelling... I'll anthropomorphize them as toddlers: "The ninja pirate dinosaur robot from my pretend-play is totally real, and it's hiding under my bed."

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u/demedlar 5 points at 1686333586.000000

Tldr: why it’s wrong to be objective when reporting on a war that America has taken sides on.

I mean, literally, that Twitter thread says reporters are behaving unethically if they don’t explicitly state Ukrainians tell the truth and Russians lie. If that’s not valorizing yellow journalism I don’t know what is.

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u/pocket_eggs 5 points at 1686402954.000000

Is your complaint that Russia isn't such a low reliability source to warrant Snyder's suggested treatment of it, or that there cannot be low enough reliability for such treatment in principle? I'm not going to try to contradict you if you believe the former, but it's not always "objective" to just go with the he said she said, in cases where one of the parties is a notorious, serial purveyor of blatant falsehoods.

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u/BlueSwablr 0 points at 1686392198.000000

Yeah initially I thought we were to be sneering about that, which felt out of place on this sub. It was a bit odd to see a guy arguing against one form of bad journalism by saying “disregard everything one of these sides say, and treat everything that the other side says as true”

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u/SweetCherryDumplings 5 points at 1686400405.000000

Oh, I wish I explained clearer - sorry about that. As for the example: it's not about "everything" as such. The guidelines are about reporting, in particular, on the Kakhovka Dam tragedy of June 6, 2023: a specific event in space and time. Essentially: "If someone says it's raining, and another person says it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true." Journalistic investigations tend to be much more complex than that. In this particular dam situation, though, there is a comically literal example. An official working for the occupying force is standing in front of a window. The massive deep flood is clearly visible through the window. He's delivering an announcement. He's saying that the situation is under control, and the flood isn't bad enough to disrupt any usual shopping, walking around, driving, or work. We can literally do what the quote tells us to: look out the window in that video and find out! If anyone wants to try for themselves: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jirEg558n08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jirEg558n08) This is a 20-second excerpt with a translation. The original video has been verified via multiple sources.

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