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Re34: Opinions

Retraice^1

We involuntarily model hyperobjects and then yap about them.

Air date: Saturday, 29th Oct. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

We are not our opinions

And our opinions are not about what we say they're about. They're about glimpses of `somethings', and we make models of those somethings based on our glimpses. And those somethings are almost always hyperobjects. Our opinions are about hyperobjects. And our opinions keep changing, involuntarily, automatically, and we keep saying them out loud. But we are not our opinions.

The guy at the sandwich shop

The following happened today at a sandwich shop.

1. Customer A asks a server if he usually works alone. Yes, they only have two `real' employees. 2. Customer B, a manager himself, tells of his difficulties getting machinists, and how different that is nowadays, and how the CHIPS & Science^2 money is distorting the B2B market.

We can interpret this as a B&R (blue and red) politics issue, either politics is the cause, or politics is the effect. 3. Customer B seems to be expecting me to challenge his opinion.

Note: We shouldn't identify ourselves with our opinions, given that our opinions are so fluid and changing and perhaps involuntary, because it leads to defensiveness and over-reaction.^3 4. I ask `What about TSMC, China invading Taiwan?' 5. We talk past each other cordially, the end.

Opinions are about hyperobjects

Timothy Morton, professor of English at Rice University in Texas and writer on philosophy and ecology, defines hyperobjects as:

"products such as Styrofoam [sic] and plutonium that exist on almost unthinkable timescales. Like the strange stranger, these materials confound our limited, fixated, self-oriented frameworks."^4

And, alternatively:

"things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans."^5

There is a probably-related school of thought in philosophy called `object-oriented' ontology.

By a certain reading of these definitions, almost everything is a hyperobject. But certainly complex things such as economies, federal legislation and its unintended consequences, etc., can be seen as hyperobjects. Even atoms and molecules can be interpreted this way.

If more or less everything is a hyperobject, then we should be humbled by the various things about which we have opinions.

Munger's razor

What is an opinion? Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's lawyer and partner at Berkshire Hathaway, says they're an indirect check on `intense ideology' because we shouldn't have (or speak) an intense opinion until we've done some serious homework:

"I have what I call an `iron prescription' that helps me keep sane when I drift toward preferring one intense ideology over another. I feel that I'm not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I've reached that state. This sounds almost as extreme as the `iron prescription' Dean Acheson was fond of attributing to William the Silent of Orange, who roughly said, `It's not necessary to hope in order to persevere.' That probably is too tough for most people, although I hope it won't ever become too tough for me. My way of avoiding over-intensity in ideology is easier than Acheson's injunction and worth learning. This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is very, very important in life. If you want to end up wise, heavy ideology is very likely to prevent that outcome."^6

The world about which we're supposed to have opinions

Consider Walter Lippmann's assessment--in 1920!

The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding. What he knows of events that matter enormously to him, the purposes of governments, the aspirations of peoples, the struggle of classes, he knows at second, third, or fourth hand. He cannot go and see for himself. Even the things that are near to him have become too involved for his judgment. I know of no man, even among those who devote all of their time to watching public affairs, who can even pretend to keep track, at the same time, of his city government, his state government, Congress, the departments, the industrial situation, and the rest of the world. What men who make the study of politics a vocation cannot do, the man who has an hour a day for newspapers and talk cannot possibly hope to do. He must seize catchwords and headlines or nothing.

This vast elaboration of the subject-matter of politics is the root of the whole problem. News comes from a distance; it comes helter-skelter, in inconceivable confusion; it deals with matters that are not easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people who must take what is given to them. Any lawyer with a sense of evidence knows how unreliable such information must necessarily be.^7

We are in touch^8 with too many hyperobjects, and our opinions have become garbage. Or perhaps we're aware of too many hyperobjects--too many for our current methods of thinking about them to handle. Does anyone even attempt, in B&R (blue and red) politics, to steel-man (as opposed to straw-man) the other side's position?

We're going to need a bigger boat.^9

_

References

Kaufman, P. D. (Ed.) (2008). Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. Donning, expanded third ed. ISBN: 978-1578645015. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781578645015 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781578645015 https://lccn.loc.gov/2021288404

Lippmann, W. (1920). Liberty and the News. Harcourt, Brace and Howe (Leopold Reprint). No ISBN. eBook and searches: https://books.google.com/books?id=Df-SzcLRcAIC Retrieved 24th Feb. 2022. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Liberty+and+the+News+Lippmann https://www.google.com/search?q=liberty+and+the+news+lippmann https://lccn.loc.gov/20004814

Morton, T. (2010). The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 978-0674049208. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780674049208 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780674049208 https://lccn.loc.gov/2009038804

Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Univ Of Minnesota Press. ISBN: 978-0816689231. https://archive.org/details/hyperobjects-philosophy-and-ecology/page/n7/mode/2up Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780816689231 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780816689231 https://lccn.loc.gov/2013028374

Retraice (2022/10/27). Re32: AI News. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re32 Retrieved 31st Oct. 2022.

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 Chips and Science Act, wikipedia.org.

^3 Who made this point? FIXME TODO FOLLOWUP

^4 Morton (2010) p. 19.

^5 Morton (2013) p. 8 (PDF).

^6 Kaufman (2008) p. 430.

^7 Lippmann (1920) pp. 37-38.

^8 See Retraice (2022/10/27) on information, especially Stuart Russell's explanation from Waking Up With Sam Harris #53 The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence. Nov. 23, 2016, from 0:07:06: " So there are many, many ways the world could be and information is just something that tells you a little bit more about what the world is, which way is the real world out of all the possibilities that it could be. And as you get more and more information about the world--typically we get it through our eyes and ears and increasingly we're getting it through the internet--then that information helps to narrow down the ways that the real world could be."

^9 Jaws allusion.