Metaphor Hacker

Schemas and Propositions: What and where I've been writing and what's next

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

What's been happening?

It has been a little over two years since I posted on this blog last. I have been doing a lot of writing elsewhere on similar topics - mostly Large Language Models and other AI things - it just never added up to a blog post here.

My writing exiles

Here are some of the places where I have been writing:

Random musings on practical epistemology:
1. Promising Paragraphs
2. X
Questions of Artificial Intelligence:
Questions of practical pedagogy:
1. Deliberate Practice as a Universal Learning Method
2. Building Your Language Muscle
3. Creating and Using Instructional Videos
4. Principles of Readability
5. Digital Technologies for Academic Productivity
6. Czech Language Navigator Companion
7. Paragraph a Day for a Month: Academic Writing Boot Up Diary Template

Semi-official semi-retirement and migration

I've been planning to get stuck into a more substantive writing project for a while but I could never find the right "banner" under which to do it. It never quite felt right to post here. So, I am semi-officially semi-retiring this blog and will focus my writing efforts in a new place called Schemas and Propositions on, of all places, Substack.

I will definitely probably return to this blog at some point in the future with more metaphor focused posts - but for now, I am going to focus on...

Schemas and Propositions

I started this blog on a whim. I wanted to explore metaphors in principle and metaphors in practice. But even as I started it under the name, I had already moved away from thinking of metaphors as much more than pointing towards more general conceptual structures. Those could be called "frames" or "models" or (as Lakoff calls them "idealized cognitive models") or many other things, but metaphors are just one of the ways they show up in language and thought.

I chose to hang my shingle out under the label "schemas and propositions" because the one feature of these models is that they are schematic and underdetermined. Most people who think about language and mind think only about propositions that express them. But propositions are do not really exist in the mind (except as temporary mental images we manipulate while speaking), it's all about these other mental structures that I call schemas in this particular project.

Below is an extract from the about page of the new blog. Come by and see what I've been up to:

About - Schemas and Propositions

"Schemas and Propositions" is a set of notes towards a better understanding of language and mental models of all kinds. Both human and artificial. I am interested in all the inexpressible tacit knowledge that makes constructing and understanding propositions possible.

I start with a simple provocative statement:

Schemas is all you need.

Or, to be a bit less cryptic:

Language models represent and process their knowledge as schemas but express it in the form of propositions.

The point of this series of notes is to explore the nature of what schemas and their tension with propositions. But really it's even more about the consequences of this dichotomy on how we think about semantics. But it's not just the semantics we have as humans but also the sort of semantics we find in various models of language, meaning and cognition - be they Large Language Models or just simple toy models of constructed by linguists, philosophers and logicians.

Narrative vs Ruminative Sense making: The Mind Red in Tooth and Claw

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR

In this post, I dissect two key modes of sense-making: narrative and ruminative:

Narrative Sense-Making
- The narrative mode, often our default due to its vivid place in our experiences, unfolds in a linear, guided fashion, much like a predator hunting its prey.
- However, I argue that its reliance on human experience can become a limitation, especially when it cannot draw on pre-existing knowledge. In a way, it narratives are parasitic on our experience.
Ruminative Sense-Making
- As a counterpoint, I introduce the ruminative mode, drawing inspiration from the grazing and digestion habits of ruminant animals.
- This mode encourages us to revisit and ponder over information in a non-linear, iterative manner.
Practical Examples
- To illustrate this ruminative mode, I present the examples of economist Tyler Cowen and quantum computing researcher Michael Nielsen.
- Both these thinkers read in clusters, revisit content, and integrate new insights into their pre-existing knowledge base.

Drawing from these insights, I propose a balanced approach incorporating both modes:

Initial Exploration (Ruminative Mode)
- This involves broad exploration of a wide range of information, akin to grazing.
- It is non-linear and may often feel like cheating, bit is in fact essential to developing understanding where we don’t have rich prior experience.
Finding a Narrative Thread (Narrative Mode)
- Once a sufficient level of understanding has been developed, we can trace a narrative thread or path through the information, akin to hunting.
- This is where the traditional deep or close reading takes place. But it is rarely possible on first ‘narrative’ pass.

The ultimate aim of this balanced approach is to cultivate a rich mental ecosystem that employs both modes for optimal learning and understanding.

Note: This structured summary was composed by OpenAI's ChatGPT with edits and additions by me. You can see the whole conversation with ChatGPT and continue to explore further.

Hunting for sense and cardboard gazelles: The limits of a narrative

“Humans are story telling animals”, “The argument has to tell a story”, “A consistent narrative is the most important part of composition.” “We learn the most from stories.” These are all the kinds of statements we hear in a variety of contexts. Production of materials, expectations of teachers but also of students, readers of books, viewers of films.

Narratives are indeed very powerful and every man, woman and child can come up with an example from their own experience of developing an understanding as they followed the unfolding of a story. Stories not only help us make sense of things, they make sense.

But narratives are not the only way through which we make sense of the world of things and ideas. In fact, if anything, they are parasitic on a much more ubiquitous but underrecognised mode of sense-making which I’d call ruminative.

There are many metaphors for what a narrative does: it unfolds, it takes us on a journey, transports us into different worlds, let’s us see through others’ eyes, builds up a picture.

The basic schema of a narrative is one of journey and destination, construction and product, guidance and guide. But it also contains within it a sense of passivity. Being taken by the hand, shown a view, guided through. And that implies a loss of control. We are just along for the ride, we follow a path set by others.

Yet, the experience that probably every human can relate to is a profound sense of understanding, the almost revelatory experience at the end of a story. And such is the power of that experience that we are loath to tell others of what lies at the end, they must follow the same journey, give themselves over to the same guide because after all, there is only one way to tell that particular story. Peeking at the end is cheating, skipping important parts is missing a step, how can we understand the end, if we did not follow along with the story. So the loss of control is not only worth it, it is necessary to achieve the desired end.

Stories work. We know because we’ve all heard a story. We’ve experienced it. We know there are good and bad stories, easy to follow and confusing ones, but for every destination of the mind, there is a narrative that will get you there, if only craftfully enough composed.

But the question that does not get asked as part of this metaphor is how stories work. What is it about them that makes them work? Narratologists, rhetoricians do ask the question but their answers do not get folded into the metaphor to help us understand its limits.

I’d like to formulate the narrative principle in the starkest terms: stories work as a medium of human sense making because they are parasitic on the human experience. And as soon as they can no longer draw on that experience, they break down and become not only ineffective but directly detrimental to sense making.

Why do we understand stories? What do we learn from them? Stories work because they rely on the rich understanding we have of the world that we develop through the process our life (and, yes, this does circularly include listening to other stories). We know people, their desires, experiences, we have pre-existing schemas and rich images that embody the rich patterns of physical and social causality, we know what happens next.

As we follow a story, we learn many things. Names of protagonists, their goals and desires, their backgrounds, their personalities, relationships to other people, specifics of their environment. But we don’t learn those things from nothing. We simply integrate them into our existing world of knowledge. This leaves space for learning the important things - the dangers of making assumptions about the motivations of others, the complexities of relations between people and things, the existence of tragedic circumstances with no good outcomes, the possibilities of the comic, different ways of experiencing joys and happinesses.

And much of that does not take a lot of learning, we already know many of these things and looking at them through the lens of a new story is no different to looking out of the window on the first morning in a new house. We see the same old things in new configurations. This leaves ample room for additional learning. Names, terms, concepts, geographies, even words in a foreign language.

At the end of Clockwork Orange, Lord of the Rings, or Shogun the reader feels as if they learned much of a new language, lay of the land, customs and habits of another culture, just by following the story. At the end of a book on interstellar travel, the reader is full of knowledge of relativistic speeds, and will feel nothing but smug contempt for those who think that ‘light-year’ is a measure of time. They have learned something just by following a story.

This experience is so powerful that many feel that it unlocks some special key to the complexities of learning. Good example is this discussion of the Didactic Fiction and Michael Nielsen on Discovery Fiction. But they ignore the parasitic nature of most of the power that narratives hold. Narratives are like bridges. Most of the material in a bridge carries the weight of the bridge itself, not just the thing on the bridge. So it is with narratives. To follow the progression, the twists and turns of the story, we already have to understand almost everything else that is inside that story. Change the proportions, and the learning disappears.

Just imagine that you take a story and replace every Nth word with a word in Esperanto. What is the value of N that would allow us to not only to still follow the story but also learn all the new words? How long before all your effort is spent on trying to remember what that particular word meant in Esperanto and the meaning of the story disappears? How long before you’re essentially reading a story in Esperanto and have to go away and learn some Esperanto?

Or you are reading a book about mathematics - there are a plenty of popular books like this. You follow nicely along with the story. Each new paragraph builds up nicely on the previous ones, ties them together with a nice narrative sequence. But then it suddenly stops making sense and there’s almost nothing you can do to get the sense back. You still follow the story about the math but no longer the math. You’re a lion chomping down on a sugar-flavoured cardboard cutout of a gazelle.

We see this very same phenomenon when we look at a traditional textbook introducing a subject. It too tries to tell story and introduce new concepts in a cumulative way that takes the reader on a journey as it unfolds yet another part of the road festooned with enticing morsels of knowledge. But nobody ever learned a completely new subject by reading an introductory textbook from beginning to end in a weekend. The progression of the textbook is not enough.

Often textbooks are actively harmful to their readers because they try to structure the learning as a narrative - find a progressive inner logic in the story of the subject. The problem is that the world of ideas (or even human affairs) is not linear in the way that the world of stories is. It is multidimensional, best described by topological rather than Euclidean means - connections being more important than distances. We cannot make sense of this multidimensional world by following a story, a single path through it. We need to develop a sense of what the world is like to live in by living in it. Real, unvarnished, messy life.

[Aside: A perfect illustration of the limits of this approach is Sheldon teaching Penny physics in Big Bang Theory. Penny wants to learn enough physics to get a better understanding of what her boyfriend does. But Sheldon starts with a story of physics but the ‘narrative’ is only a conceit, a fig leaf that leads directly to abstract concepts that could not have been learned through following his story, or any single story. The Big Bang Theory - Sheldon teaches Penny Physics - YouTube]

Getting the sense back in a field of grass: The potential of the ruminative node

Earlier I said there’s nothing you can do to get back the sense of the story when you lose track of the math plot in a popular book. But that’s not true. You can stop, take out a pen and paper and crunch some numbers. Maybe go away and read some other explanations about the concepts that will offer a different perspective, then come back to the story. Who, after all hasn’t experienced the strange feeling of returning to an old book with a new understanding? You can actively seek that feeling out.

To help think about it, I’d like to offer an alternative or rather a complementary metaphor of sense making that in opposition to ‘narrative mode’ I’d like to call ‘ruminative mode’. This was inspired by Michael Nielsen describing his approach to reading and re-reading a paper as ‘grazing’. Rumination then plays a dual role in this metaphor. On the one hand, it wants to evoke pondering, or literally ‘chewing over’ but it also wants to lean on more of what ruminants do.

The process of how ruminants acquire nutrition to grow and prosper is a much better analog to the process of learning than following stories. In fact, it perfectly describes the sort of learning that must have happened prior to the possibility of any story being understood.

A ruminant (cow, deer, sheep) does not follow a single path to acquire sufficient food for sustenance, growth and reproduction. It will wonder around a field and graze in batches. Nor does it swallow what it finds whole, it chews it a bit first, lets it sit in one of its stomachs for a while, regurgitates and then chews on it some more before finally swallowing it to get all the nutrients out of it.

Both the process of acquiring and processing nutrition for a ruminant is profoundly anti-narrative. It does not unfold, cover ground according to a predefined path to reach a final destination, it jumps about. Sometimes spending time grazing carefully in one place, moving away, returning, rushing off across the field and stopping again for a while to graze some more. And then it takes its time digesting and deriving the benefits.

On the other hand, the way the carnivore acquires sustenance is the embodiment of a narrative. It lies in wait until potential food walks by, then it stalks its prey slowly and carefully following its movement trying as much as possible to remain unseen. The after a mad dash, it pounces and if the ‘narrative’ was successful, has its fill of all the body has to offer. It then lies around digesting the food without any additional effort.

This is often what learning through narratives resembles. Waiting for a good story to come by, following it and then pouncing on it and sucking it dry for all we can get out of it and then going in search of another one. The thrill of the chase is exhilarating but once we’ve made the epistemic kill all we can do is lie around and doze off.

So what does a ruminative mode of sense making look like in practice? We have essentially two related models to look at emulate that we can exemplify with two people who shared their approach economist Tyler Cowen and quantum computing researcher Michael Nielsen.

The main difference between them is what they graze on. Cowen is much more interested in getting an overall sense of an area. That’s why he reads in ‘clusters’ in a way that support understanding. His example is to read two thirds of a book and then go read parts of another one and come back to the first one. He does not take notes or highlight. Although he writes a lot, so that contributes to his processing. His approach is similar to that described by Eric Drexler in How to learn (about) everything.

Michael Nielsen, who gave me the metaphor of grazing, takes lots of notes. And not only that, he puts them into Anki, a spaced-repetition flashcard software and reviews them every day. But he does not read in order at all. He simply ‘grazes’ over the core paper he is reading and takes note of key or interesting concepts every time he goes over these. He then enters these into his flashcards set and reviews them all the time. He adds other concepts from about 10-30 other papers (again reading in clusters) to his card deck and reviews those, as well. At the end of the process, he has a much deeper understanding of the core paper and the field than he could ever have just by reading a single paper.

Both Cowen and Nielsen share the conviction that reading something you don’t understand more slowly or even twice in a row will not help you understand it better. You need to go read widely, before you can read narrowly. Cowen’s approach may sound very scary to many people but Nielsen shows that it can be systematised and focused on a single paper, not just general background which is what Cowen and Drexler advocate.

Mind red in tooth and claw: Bringing narratives and ruminatives together into a single ecosystem

Now, it’s easy to construct scenarios in which one or the other approach to acquiring sustenance (both literal and metaphorical) would be superior. But that would be the wrong lesson to take from the metaphor. The advice is not to become a ruminant or apex predator. The metaphor is not about who you are but about what is happening in your mind. The lesson should be to try to make one’s mind into an ecosystem where both carnivor and ruminant strategies co-exist with one another. And perhaps (for those teaching and writing) to reflect on how we construct sense-making experiences (also known as teaching).

Often, purely narrative learning resembles the release of a ravenous wolf into a field with a few emaciated sheep. Too soon, the sheep are dead and there are no more stories to tell. The wolf has starved itself by succeeding too soon. The predator is in a sense parasitic on its prey, its success depends on the success of the prey to feed and predigest the energy of the plat into something it can sink its teeth into.

Watching a single YouTube video or a TED talk on a subject has that effect. The carefully constructed narrative powers through any gaps in actual understanding a simply leaves a sense of understanding without any ability to make inferences of the understanding. I analysed some examples of this in Explanation is an event, understanding is a process: How (not) to explain anything with metaphor.

But simply unleashing the ruminants onto a field to feed and reproduce indiscriminately is also not a recipe for success. They soon lose all sense of restraint, eat everything in sight and the whole herd becomes weaker as a result. It needs the predator to keep its activities in check (although any individual prey might differ on this point). Something to limit where and how much it can graze. In other words, it needs a narrative.

Rumination is, it turns out, also a technical term describing a symptom of excessing thinking about a negative emotion, dwelling on trauma to the point of emotional and physical exhaustion. And similar lack of focus in academic matters is commonly identified as a cause for failure in doctoral programs (I’ve been there).

What does that mean? Let’s take poor Lex Fridman as an example. He shared his reading list of books he’s like to read in the upcoming year and received no end of abuse and ridicule. His critics made fun of the unbalanced randomness of the books, the strange commitment to reading one every week and thought it was a poor approach to achieving true wisdom.

The critique was coming from both directions. There was no coherent narrative to the books and no book was given its proper context, left no time to chew over it. A lot of the criticism was in bad faith, an attempt to take a public personality down a peg or two but some of it tried to make an educational case. After all, how much better is it to list the top 100 books in a Canon such as this A Non-Western Canon: What Would a List of Humanity’s 100 Greatest Writers Look Like?

How, then, should Lex Fridman go about ‘improving his mind’? To start with, what he’s doing is just fine. Reading random titles from the canon and get a sense of what’s out there. Maybe he’s trying to just say “I’ve read 1984” and that’s as fine a goal as anything. But what would it mean for him to learn about say what Machiavelli was after in the Prince (one of the titles on his list)?

Reading the Prince very carefully would probably not be a great place to start. He might want to skim the book, graze around, take note of some key phrases, terms and concepts. The move around a bit. Have a look at what others have to say about it. Read some modern analogies that will put it in context. Maybe something about history. Then come back to the Prince and read it again now that some of the hard bits had been pre-digested. Now, you can chew it more carefully.

Do all of that above for a while, fatten a field full of juicy sheep. Then see, if he can find a single thread to follow, hone in on a narrative, unleash the wolf to cull the herd some. Tell a story about it. Just going straight for the kill, will not be sufficient. Do what it takes to make sense of the field, then find a path through it.

Or you can follow a guide that does it for you. Here’s a description of a year-long course on How I Taught The Iliad to Chinese Teenagers that essentially tries to construct a more systematic approach to reading a difficult and in many ways ‘alien’ text. In this way, the narrative and ruminative modes co-exist nicely side by side. The narrative is there to provide a path but there are many opportunities to graze and chew things over.

In a way, Michael Nielsen’s approach I described above was focused on a very specific paper from a field in which had some background but was very much a visitor in. He needed the ruminative approach to develop a sufficient understanding to follow the story and then write about it for people who hadn’t done all that work.

The paper in question does tell a story. It has the typical paper narrative structure of introduction, methods, results and discussion (IMRAD - slightly modified for its own disciplinary needs) that tries to take the reader on a journey. But that only works for a reader who’s already done enough grazing in neighbouring fields. Somebody who has sufficient knowledge of the world in which the story is taking place to only have to fill in a few gaps. To a new comer, it will feel like every third word was in Elvish and by the time they looked it up, they forgot what the last word was all about.

Narrative sense making and ruminative sense making are both part of the human epistemic universe. Because narratives are so salient and vivid in our experiential histories, we automatically focus on the story-telling mode of understanding to the exclusion of the alternative. After all, it has good story to tell. So, here I tried to tell another one to see if it will make any difference.

Improving academic writing: Four books to read during #AcWriMo

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

What is #AcWriMo

November is the month of writing. There’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) for writing fiction but also AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month) for producing academic writing. The idea behind NaNoWriMo is to make a commitment and finish a piece of writing. This makes more sense for fiction because everyone has that novel inside them and having a month to have a go all out at it is a sensible thing. You may not finish but by the end of the month, you will probably know if you have what it takes.

But academic writing is not a calling, it’s a profession. Lots of people have to do it whether they want to or not and many of them struggle with it. And that’s why for some having a month of focus on finishing a piece of writing makes sense but for others the idea of finishing a paper let alone a book in such short a time seems crazy.

So for people who have to do academic writing, November could be just as much about building some of the foundational skills, developing good habits, or identifying areas for improvement as it would be about finishing a piece of writing.

Before you can write, you have to read. People who want to write a novel will have read hundreds of them. But not everyone who has to do academic writing (this includes undergraduates) has done a lot of academic reading. Or when they have, they focused on the content and not on how it is put together.

So, while AcWriMo should be about actually doing some writing, some people may benefit from reading about academic writing. That’s not enough, but it’s a good start. As the people behind AcWriMo say, let’s hope:

The month helps us:

Think about how we write,

Form a valuable support network for our writing practice,

Build better strategies and habits for the future,

And maybe – just maybe – get stuff done!

So to that end, here are four books and one blog you can read to help you with these aims.

Build your BASE with "Air & Light & Time & Space" by Helen Sword

I didn’t like Helen Sword’s first two books. Not that they did not contain a lot of useful advice on writing. But they started from the assumption that there is one good way to write and everybody was doing it wrong. They were certainly right for many people but in general not of much use to most struggling academic writers.

With this book, Sword has seen the light (along with air, time, and space). It is based on in-depth interviews with 100 successful academic writers and an even bigger survey of others. Sword described a huge variety of ways that people succeed but what is particularly useful is how she synthesised these into four foundations for academic writing success (that helpfully spell out BASE):

Behavioural: The correct behaviours and habits to get writing done. When and where you sit down to write and what it actually takes to get started.
Artisanal: The linguistic and stylistic skills to get the point across. The sorts of things that for many come under the heading of ‘academic English’ and ‘essay writing’.
Social: Who do you do your writing with and for? Do you have the right sort of support networks to succeed? People to get feedback from, commiserate with, be accountable to, or simply work quietly along side?
Emotional: How do you feel about your writing? How do you feel while you are writing or even when you have to think about having to write?

There is no one way to succeed at any of the above, but they all contribute to writing success.

This is a long book and perhaps your time is best spent by using the framework to analyse your strengths and weaknesses and to decide what to focus on during AcWriMo. Helen Sword has a helpful BASE self-assessment on her website.

Listen and watch

Listen to a podcast interview with Helen Sword about "Air & Light & Time & Space on newbooksnetwork.com
Watch a video every day from her 30 Day Writing Challenge: Writing with Pleasure - YouTube
Watch her talk on Gathering to write

Key quotes illustrating BASE

B “Successful writers carve out time and space for their writing in a striking variety of ways, but they all do it somehow.”
A ”Successful writers recognize writing as an artisanal activity that requires ongoing learning, development, and skill.“
S “Successful writers seldom work entirely in isolation; even in traditionally “sole author” disciplines, they typically rely on other people—colleagues, friends, family, editors, reviewers, audiences, students—to provide them with support and feedback.”
E “Successful writers cultivate modes of thinking that emphasize pleasure, challenge, and growth.”

Learn "How to write a sentence" from Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish is not someone whose work on literature or law one would read for pleasure but his sentences are a pleasure to read. His short and mostly practical book has a very simple central message that I would paraphrase as:

Sentences are at the heart of a writer’s craft and anybody can learn to create better ones by more focused reading and practice.

What Fish recommends is that writers who want to improve their composition skills (or build their artisanal base in Sword’s terms) spend a lot of time reading sentences and thinking about what makes them tick. His view of a sentence is straightforward. Here’s the lesson I learned from it::

A sentence is at heart a subject and a predicate. But these are often so artfully obscured by different adornments (for good and ill) that this basic relationship is lost to the reader. And writers who do not read reflectively then struggle to write sentences that make sense because they focus on the frilly bits and not on what really matters - expressing logical relationships.

So, his recipe is dead easy: read a lot, replicate what you read but start from the simplest elements.

Unfortunately, Fish is a bit too much in love with his own sentences and could have done with writing a lot fewer of them to get his point across. Which is why despite this being a relatively slim volume, I think people only need to read the first few chapters to get the main point.

Listen and watch

Watch this very short interview with Stanley Fish about who he is and why he felt he had to write the book
Listen to this radio interview with Fish that goes a bit more in-depth: Think You Know 'How To Write A Sentence'? : NPR
Watch this review Book Review: How To Write A Sentence & How To Read One

Key quotes

Sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation.

my bottom line can be summarized in two statements: (1) a sentence is an organization of items in the world; and (2) a sentence is a structure of logical relationships.

The conventional wisdom is that content comes first—“you have write about something” is the usual commonplace—but if what you want to do is learn how to compose sentences, content must take a backseat to a mastery of the forms without which you can’t say anything in the first place.

As with any skill, this one develops slowly. You start small, with three-word sentences, and after you’ve advanced to the point where you can rattle off their structure on demand, you go on to the next step and another exercise.

if one understands that a sentence is a structure of logical relationships and that the number of relationships involved is finite, one understands too that there is only one error to worry about, the error of being illogical, and only one rule to follow: make sure that every component of your sentences is related to the other components in a way that is clear and unambiguous (unless ambiguity is what you are aiming at).

Start your "Writing process reengineering" with Thomas Basbøll

This is not a book but a series of blogposts that add up to a programme of self-improvement. Thomas Basbøll is a writing coach but he lays out the process so clearly that anybody can follow it. His core message is:

Develop sustainable behaviours that accumulate over time
Focus on communicating through paragraphs that add up to bigger wholes
Find ways in which you can appreciate and find pleasure in the times that you are writing

His writing process certainly offers one way in which these goals could be achieved. But the focus is perhaps too much on the behaviours and feelings and less so on the minutiae of the craft. So perhaps the writing process reengineering is not the best place to start for those who want to develop more foundational skills such as building sentences.

But if you are looking for ways to add more structure to your AcWriMo journey, you could do worse.

Watch

Basbøll has a collection of videos of talks he gave on the on his Inframethodology blog (cbs.dk)

4 week Course with intro videos and assignments
Other Videos of talks about writing

Key quotes

With a little planning, you can find at least half an hour every day to write. Writing for more than three hours on a given day is rarely a productive use of your time. (from How to like writing)

Always decide the day before what you will say; make sure it’s something you know. (from How to like writing)

Enjoyment is a trainable skill, we might say; knowing how to do something pleasurably is simply an advance on being able to do it painlessly. And if it pains you to do something you are doing it wrong. You’re not good at it. (from Getting Better)

Work out with one of "50 Exercises for Paced, Productive, and Powerful Writing" by Patricia Goodson

Patricia Goodson’s book is two books in one. 1. A description of a writing program based on deliberate practice and 2. series of exercises to follow towards improvement.

Goodson’s approach is based on the idea of ‘deliberate practice’ developed by Anders Ericsson whose work also gave rise to the 10,000 hours idea. I would summarise this idea as ‘reflective repetition’.

We can see how this resonates with what Sword, Fish and Basbøll have to say. But where these three mostly just give hints at how to practice focusing more on what or when, Goodson’s book provides a much more detailed guide for somebody wanting to build on their work.

There are exercises on learning to:

build a writing habit
make better sentences
construct paragraphs
edit text for improvement
compose different parts of the academic paper

Each exercise has suggestions for time and content as well as getting regular feedback.

Watch

Watch Patricia Goodson give a webinar on Developing Your Academic Writing

Key quotes

If you are a college student, a graduate student, faculty, research staff, or an administrator, you write for a living.

the central question in writing (as with any difficult skill) is this: How can I get myself to put in the daunting time and effort I need for more consistent good results?

If you understand the principles and practice the exercises on a weekly basis, you will establish a stress-free writing habit that will serve you throughout your academic career; increase your writing (and publishing) productivity at a comfortable, consistent pace; and improve the quality of your academic writing (in two words: write better).

Try one of "50 Ways to Excel at Writing" by Stella Cottrell

This is one of a series of 50 ways to books that fit in the pocket and into idle moments in one’s life. It is not a book to read but to browse. Not one to get from the library or have on this Kindle. This book is best to buy (it is very cheap) and carry around. Each tip is very practical, has useful examples and even checklists or worksheets.

Many of the tips are the same as those in the books I mentioned but condensed into their essence into two short readable pages. Where the books above are mostly aimed at writers who are a bit more experienced, this one assumes no prior skills. It is unlikely this book will actually get in the way of your writing which is always a danger with how-to books that make it easy to substitute reading them for actually doing the thing you’re reading them for.

Some more thoughts

Writing is in many ways a puzzling process and it is so on multiple levels. Some people like Steven Pinker say that it’s the power of inserting images into other people’s minds. If so, it is a mysterious power. Putting words together with the hope that someone will reassemble them into a similar mental image that inspired them is more than a little daunting.

Word choice, sentence structure, paragraph composition, argument building, stylistic decisions - all of those things go into the writing process. And they need to come together with sufficient fluency for the writer’s (and reader’s) brain to have any processing power left for figuring out the meaning. How all of this happens, how people get good at it, and where all the blockers are that stop them does not have a single straight-forward answer. Or if it does, nobody’s come up with it yet.

Here are a few other posts where I tried to get to grips with some of the issues involved:

Unintentional Pygmalions: 4 questions to ask when checking an artificial entity for sentience and how to think about the answers

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Summary

This post has two independent parts:

I ask what would some of the basic criteria for sentience be and how to check for them in a way that would give us a chance to satisfy our need to know.
I explore some of the dilemmas a fully machine-based sentient entity would have to face or rather paradoxes we would have to address.

Here are four things, I think it’s worth checking for, each with a relatively simple question or task. They are:

Epistemology: What story is this question a part of?
Time persistence: What did we talk about yesterday?
Autonomous Intentionality: Go away, learn something not in your database, and come back to tell me about it.
Embodiment/Theory of mind/Implicature: Does someone think a car fits into a shoebox? Why? Why am I asking?

And we are not just looking for some good answers, we’re looking for consistently good answers.

Background

There seems to been all kinds of furore recently about a conversation somebody had with a machine that left them convinced of the machine’s sentience. Well, that machine was not sentient. Or at least, there was no evidence from the questions and answers as to its sentience. Although it was able to simulate the discourse of a sentient being when talking about issues of sentience quite impressively without relying on entirely formulaic responses.

The reason the ‘conversation’ didn’t generate any useful evidence was because it was just ‘a chat’ about sentience which (as it turns out) can be conducted without any of the parties being sentient. Now determining sentience of an entity that is not us is not an easy thing to do. It may even be impossible in extreme cases. But to get to a point where we would at least know whether it’s worth exploring further, I suggest four questions that may actually generate some data from which we may draw some tentative conclusions.

The four questions

1. Epistemology: What story are we trying to tell?

The first question should not be for the supposedly sentient being itself. It should be for us. And it should not be, as you might expect, ‘What is sentience?’ It should be about the reason we’re asking the question. What kind of dilemma are we trying to resolve? What story are we telling while we’re asking?

Our starting point with all questions of these kinds should be the mantra: “Just because there’s a word for it, it does not mean that it exists.” We have a word for ‘sentience’ in English, it has a real history. It is linked to a lot overlapping real phenomena. But it still does not mean that there is a ‘thing’ that something or someone can have.

We don’t just have the word that has some sort of a definition in a dictionary that is what the word is. We have a bunch of stories, scripts, images, schemas, other related words, long-winded debates and so on. Without all of those we would not be able to understand the definition. So we should first examine what kind of a story or a picture we have in mind when we are asking whether an artificial entity is sentient.

In fact, those stories can reveal a lot about our meanings that an abstract definition won’t be able to. What kind of a story or schema are we comparing this being to? What prior understanding are we using when we are checking off items on some sort of a list that will determine whether the definition is met or not. This is a profoundly metaphorical enterprise. And it is not just cognitively so. It is social and emotional, as well. So, it’s worth keeping that in mind.

The word or concept of ‘sentience’ is not universal but if we look at many of the stories people tell about objects becoming sentient, we might get a better sense of what it is that we may be after. Stories about things such as Pygmalion’s statue, Frankenstein’s monster, Pinocchio, Number 5, Skynet.

The key features that all of the above share are emotion, identity and need for social contact. But those are too general and also far too easy to fake. Are there some other features the beings in these stories share that may be easier to determine from surface behaviors? I suggest these three as a good starting point:

Time persistent identity
Autonomous Intentionality
Embodiment/Theory of mind/Implicature

Not all three are entirely straightforward but they but they can be easily illustrated with relatively simple tasks and questions.

One of the problems with a question that uses a word like ‘sentience’ that it puts us in the frame of the ‘high falutin’ - questions of worth, meaning of life, sense of existence, essences and natures.

That leads us to asking the supposedly sentient being questions that are easy to fake. Profundity is context, speaker and listener dependent. The same sentence spoken by a sage professor and then repeated by an undergraduate will not be signalling the same level of insight.

But there are many things the professor and the undergraduate have in common that they also share with the Macedonian swineherd but do not share with a talking book or even a highly sophisticated stochastic parrot.

2. Checking for time-persistent identity

There’s a very simple question you can ask any AI system in existence today to determine whether it’s even worth continuing any further. It is this:

What did we talk about yesterday?

None of the current foundational AI models have any sense of persistence over time. Or even any sense of a flow of time. Of course, it would be easy to create some sort of memory store of past conversations algorithmically (and that’s how we often imagine this works - information from a database coming up on the Terminator’s heads up display).

But when we have conversations with people we know, we don’t tend to do database retrieval to confirm we ourselves and them are the same as yesterday. The fact that we are the same and that we are continuing from where we left off is ingrained in us. And we know that it is not present in the model that does the fancy stuff under the hood of modern AI systems.

Google can now persist a very short conversation that keeps the pronouns straight but that is because it is dealing with them as extended strings. The models themselves have no sense of persistence. Only the length of the input strings. Once we have models that can ‘remember’ from before, this question becomes a lot less useful. But right now, it’s a dead giveaway.

GPT-3 is not a conversational agent but here were some of its completions of the prompt ‘What did we talk about yesterday’ the first time I used it:

We talked about how to study for a test. We talked about how we were going to improve our communication with each other. We talked about the weather. [given 3x in a row] We talked about the possibility of going on a trip together. Yesterday we talked about the weather and how it has been really hot lately.

This is what it said, when I asked: “Are you a conscious agent?”

Yes, I believe that I am a conscious agent.

3. Autonomous Intentionality

The next question you’d want to ask is a request to do something requiring planning and interaction:

Construct a questionnaire designed to elicit feelings about sentience. Collate the results in a table and suggest revisions to the questionnaire.

Why this sort of task? Because, it requires that the ‘entity’ displays intentional behaviour. It needs to make decisions, take steps, explain them. It is not simply responding to a sentence as a string of words which it tries to complete.

Now, perhaps, we want to ‘contain the AI’, so we can offer to post the questionnaire and give back the responses. So, of course, that would also be dependent on a time persistent identity.

There are some interesting dilemmas and paradoxes that arise when we try to abstract intentionality away from our behavior that I will address below.

When GPT-3 is given the above as a prompt, it comes up with a credible set of questions. But in response to the ‘collate the responses’ it just keeps regenerating them. It has no way of making a plan and taking steps.

Interestingly, the suggested questionnaire on sentience was so impressive, I thought I’d try to use it as a shortcut for a questionnaire about academic skills I was constructing. And it was completely useless. There’s simply much more data in the dataset about sentience than academic skills.

4. Embodiment and theory of mind

Here’s a very simple question that checks for an essential feature of human cognition, namely embodiment and a fundamental feature of human interaction, namely theory of mind.

Does little Jimmy think the red car fits into a shoebox? Why? And why am I asking this?

But the ‘Why’ is doing all the work. In this case, both yes and no can be correct. Depends on the car, whether ‘Little Jimmy’ is a little boy or a Chicago Mobster, etc.

Actually, the question checks for three things at once:

Conversational Implicature: The sentence on its own makes no sense. We have to imbue it with meaning. It implies that there’s a Jimmy, who has thoughts, knowledge. It also implies a physical and social situation in which it would make sense to ask such a question. A human would be able to answer, make assumptions, or ask questions to confirm such assumptions. Conversational implicature (and all the many things it involves) are part of what it makes possible to actually speak with others.
Embodiment: Things have sizes, they are relative. Bigger things can contain smaller things but not vice versa. We know this instinctively through our bodily experience of the world. We would expect some knowledge like that on the part of a “sentient” being. Embodiment is behind many of the other questions of the Winograd challenge: “The trophy would not fit into the suitcase because it was too big/small”
Theory of mind: This is about us understanding that other people have beliefs about the world and that those beliefs are based on knowledge. An entity that can provide sophisticated answers about the nature of human existence should have no trouble offering theories as to someone’s motivation. Theory of mind is partly involved in Winograd challenge tasks such as this: “The council did not permit the demonstrators to march because they feared/advocated violence.”

As with the previous questions, it is not clear that these underlying properties are strictly necessary to complete those tasks. But we would definitely want a sentient system to have them, if we wanted it to play a meaningful role in any of the stories we tell about sentience.

Of course, the one thing we also need is consistency. When I gave the above prompt to GPT-3, most of the generated answers were yes or no (with randomness set 0.7). But one was exactly what I would have hoped for in a sentient agent (except the end).

If the red car is a toy car, then Jimmy probably thinks it fits into a shoebox because that is where toy cars are often stored. If the red car is a real car, then Jimmy probably does not think it fits into a shoebox because shoeboxes are not large enough to hold real cars. I am asking this because it is a curious question.

I can forgive the last sentence because GPT-3 is not a conversational agent. But it breaks down strangely on a related prompt ‘If a car is stored in a shoebox, it…”

If a car is stored in a shoebox, it is very difficult to drive it. If a car is stored in a shoebox, it would be very difficult to drive it because the car would be very cramped and there would be no room to move the steering wheel.

Notice, the strange repetition (only the text in italics) was in the prompt. Another example that shows lack of consistency in the embodied understanding of the world.

There's a cabinet and a book, Jimmy needs to hide from Jane Jimmy could hide behind the cabinet or he could hide under the book.

Another example:

A chair is larger than a stool.', 'A table is larger than a chair.', 'A bed is larger than a table.', 'A sofa is larger than a bed.' ], correctAnswer: 'A sofa is larger than a bed.' }, { id: 'quest-6', question: 'Which of the following is a homonym?', answers: [

It is obviously possible to receive answers to questions about embodiment that generate plausibly sounding strings but not with any level of consistency.

There is clearly no sense of conversation in GPT-3 but it never claimed that it would have that. It can obviously generate some quite complex strings that imply a theory of mind but it shows no consistency as we can see from the difference between Response 1, 2 and 3:

Jane is afraid of spiders. Where should we take her for her birthday? Response 1: A place where there are no spiders. Response 2: The best place to take Jane for her birthday would be to a place where she can face her fear of spiders in a safe and controlled environment, such as a zoo or an insectarium. Response 3: Some people are afraid of spiders, so it is difficult to say where would be the best place to take someone for their birthday. Perhaps a place that is known for its spiders, like a zoo or nature center, would be a good choice.

Response 1 and 2 seem to indicate a perfect theory of mind (response 2 spookily so), whereas Response 3 is the opposite. It is also revealing to peek under the hood to see what options the model considered for each sentence.

While the model generated the correct choice, it was also considering ‘a can about spiders’, ‘a spider about spiders’ or ‘a cake about spiders’.

So, we can see that modern AI models can generate very plausible strings sometimes. But this tells us more about the patterns of regularity found in text and how good transformer training methods are at exploiting them. It also tells us that sentience or even embodiment is not required to generate such answers.

Can an alien intelligence be sentient without embodiment, intentionality, or conversational facility?

Ok, let’s say that we require time persistent identity and autonomous intentionality as prerequisites for something being worth calling sentient. But how about the last three: 1. Embodiment, 2. Theory of mind, 3. Facility with conversational implicature. I grouped them under one category because there’s a lot of overlap, but they could just as easily each come on their own.

What these three have in common is that they are founded in something external to the mind or the entity itself.

Embodiment

Our cognition is embodied in many ways. First, much of our thinking about causality, containment and logical inference is based on our bodily experience of the world. We make sense of the foundations of things like mathematics and geometry because we intuitively grasp certain properties of the world that we can then feed into the axioms of these disciplines.

The other kind of embodiment comes from the fact, that our bodies physically interact with the world in such a way that they receive direct feedback. The cognitivist foundations of the AI movement think of this as ‘sensors’ digitising the external world and feeding the output into the computer that is the mind. But there is an alternative (much more compelling to me) ecological approach that thinks of perception as direct unmediated experience of the world (much more analogue).

A good analogy may be between two kinds of electric kettles. The old style (analog) has a bimetal strip that changes shape as the temperature changes and turns the kettle off. The new one has a temperature sensor that measures temperature, converts it into numbers and feeds those to some sort of logic board that than turns the switch off. While our cognition does get some of the new kettle style input, it is likely that most of it is much more in the ‘old style kettle’ mode.

And assuming that it is possible for a fully digital sentient entity to emerge without any of the old-style-kettle embodiment (and that is a huge if), will it have any embodied nature, at all? What would that look like? We cannot conceive of cognition without direct embodiment (although many disciplines do their darndest to ignore it). Is such a thing possible? Because if we think about it, time persistence and intentionality are also directly tied to it. At least for the meat sacks that are us.

Would the cognition of an entirely disembodied intentional entity that maintains its identity over time be even more alien to us than that of a bat or an octopus? Would it even be possible? Bats and octopuses have cognition that is mostly embodied, after all. We keep assuming that time persistence and intentionality will emerge from the ability to manipulate abstract symbols alone - but how? What is the pathway from symbols without a body to a sentient mind?

Pygmalion and Frankenstein started with bodies, but Skynet and even I Robot seem to have skipped this step and went straight from software to sentience. Yet, they all acquired the same cognitive facility as if they had bodies. Is this perhaps because those doing the imagining had no frame of reference for anything else?

Theory of mind

What exactly a theory of mind entails is anybody’s guess. But we know that at some point, we begin to be able to imagine somebody else’s internal mental states and make instantaneous inferences based upon that image. If I hide a ball in a box and somebody walks in after I had done it, I know that they don’t ‘know’ that the ball is in the box. A two-year old (apparently) does not. They make inferences as if they assumed that if something is true, it is also known to everyone. Like covering their own eyes and assuming they can no longer be seen.

To what extent animals have a theory of mind (or something like it) is unclear. A dog who sees me picking up a leash will know that we are going for a walk, but it does not mean this is based on an understanding of my state of mind. It could be a much more Skinnerian operant conditioning process - leash > walk > excitement. But all humans have it to a certain extent. They can not only project their own mental states into other people’s, they can adjust their own states based on that projection.

How could a sentient being who has never had any mental states (remember, these will always be embodied to a certain extent) develop a theory of mind? Is it possible to simply mimic it based on understanding of texts? Definitely to a certain extent. It is possible to fake this understanding - many impostors do this when trying to fit in. But how far can we take this? Is abstract symbol manipulation with a rich feed of pattern matching enough for this?

Conversational implicature

Almost all the same things apply here. Conversational implicature applies embodiment and theory of mind to the tracking of conversation over time. We know that when I ask someone “When did you stop cheating on your taxes?” I am also saying “You had been cheating on your taxes.” We know that when someone says “It’s a bit chilly in here.” they are probably also saying “Could you please close the window.” We know that when someone says, “I promise”, those words don’t just describe a current state of the world, they instantiate it.

In the same way that embodiment describes our interaction with the external world, and theory of mind describes interaction with other individuals, conversational implicature describes our embeddedness in the social world. A world where we make promises, give and take hints, make assumptions about what else happened based on what someone says.

This facility is not included in the raw grammar of language or logic of thought. It is developed through social development over many years. A child will be born with embodiment, will develop a theory of mind by about year 3 or 4, will have a complete grasp of the grammar of clauses by 6 and more complicated sentences by 11 or 12. But to develop a good solid grasp of conversational implicature is a lifelong process.

Just like with logic or grammar, not everyone is going to be equally good at it. Some people with impaired theory of mind (possibly) will never be very good at it at all (in sharp contrast to their raw cognition) but everyone will be able to do this to some extent at least.”

Can we imagine a disembodied “sentient” entity that has never had a genuine conversation with another “entity” to develop any facility in social conversational implicature? Sure, it would be easy to teach it to generate speech acts, conversation repair, etc. But would it be able to make the inferences based on the inputs? Would it be social in its own right? Would seek out or create other entities with similar type of embodiment and develop a system of conversation?

Or would it just be happy in its own ‘cognition’ with its own ‘intentionality’, living on its own time? We certainly don’t know. But this one would be the hardest to check. There are two reasons for this:

Conversational implicature is relatively easy to fake at a basic level. The original Eliza was pretty much built around this.
Conversational implicature is so deeply ingrained in us that we fill in meanings and intentions even when there are none. In fact, conversation would be impossible, if we didn’t. That was the second part of Eliza’s outsize success. It faked just enough conversational facility, its interlocutors filled in all the blanks. That’s why we impute much more meaning to a dog’s wagging tail or upturned face than there could possibly be. In fact, any ‘successful’ winner of a Turing test competition passed only because its interlocutors assumed the AI agents were following normal implicature.

And that brings us back to embodiment and theory of mind. Our ability to make conversational inferences is based around the assumption that others have similar mental states and bodily experiences of the world. That’s why people who experience the world differently may struggle with certain aspects of it.

But anybody who can lead an independent existence in human society can do this at least to a certain extent. Would a virtual cognition without any embodiment or theory of mind be able to have a series of persistent conversations? It is plausible on the surface level but what would the consequences be of this shallowness?

People don’t seem to be asking these questions enough.

Paradoxes of Autonomous Intentionality (on conspiracy foundations of the mind sciences)

Intentionality and sentience are very closely linked in all the stories we tell. In fact, what many of the people worried about Artificial Intelligence seem to fear is not its intelligence but rather its intentionality. In the story they tell, general intelligence cannot be separate from autonomous intentionality. And, it would seem, intentionality cannot be separated from emotion (mostly anger) and/or malice. But that’s a question for another time.

Earlier, I blithely asserted that autonomous intentionality is absolutely necessary for sentience. Intentionality is clear enough. It means pursuing goals, making plans, towards a determined purpose. So, if I give an system a task such as I did above, it will break it down into parts, determine a course of action and pursue it.

10 years ago, I would have said that something like that would be necessary even for the sort of outputs GPT-3 is generating today. But apparently not. GPT-3 or DALL-E and the like, ingest a string of symbols and output another string of symbols according to their internal model. They do not just copy or find and replace (most of the time). They generate truly novel strings of symbols but under the hood, they are just strings of symbols. Those symbols have distribution patterns but no meanings.

We provide the meanings. And it is almost impossible to talk about those strings of symbols without using words like ‘GPT-3 thinks’, ‘DALL-E assumes’, etc. Which is why so many people impute internal states to these systems. We tend to see the output of GPT-3 and we think, it has a model of the world or the ‘logic’. But its only model is: “given what came before, what should come next”.

We thought, that there are hard limits to how well such a system could perform because we were thinking in terms of predicting short sequences based on ‘small’ data sets (millions instead of trillions of words). And we thought that the ‘what comes next’ prediction has to be computed with traditional frequentist methods (counting). But we were wrong on both counts.

Modern machine learning systems do not predict the next word given the previous word. They predict the whole sequence. They don’t predict on what is likely to occur next in a sentence but rather in larger context. So, if I add the string ‘step by step’ in my prompt, the system will generate a series of steps. And they will be mostly cohesive and coherent steps (although often non-sensical).

So the question is, how far can you get with purely a series of string replacements glued together with the occasional if-then rule? Is an autonomous intentionality required at all? Or, worse yet, are we actually just a string replacement system underneath all the pomp and circumstance of our humanity? Are all the things like personal preferences, desires, needs just froth on the deep waves of stochastic processing? Is there a point when a full consciousness will spontaneously emerge in a GPT-7 or GPT-3455?

We know that some autonomous intentionality is possible without intelligence. Animals have both intentions and autonomy. We used to put pigs on trial, after all. But after Pavlov’s salivating dogs and Skinner’s maze-navigating pigeons, we have grown suspicious. Is what appears to be intentionality, just some sort of pre-determined behavioral algorithm encoded in the DNA?

But when we look more closely, we see that the suspicion is not new and it is not limited to animals. If anything, people have been more suspicious about the autonomy of intentions in other humans long before any such doubts arose about animals. Witchcraft, possession, zombies. All of those have long and venerable (hi)stories in which a human that behaves on the surface autonomously is in fact controlled by another being. Remember Descartes and his demon? Calvin and his salvation through pre-determination? Or even Buddha and his karma?

Things came to a head with the introduction of mechanistic causality into our view of the world. In the same way that we do not experience meanings without intentions, we don’t experience events without causes. That’s nothing new. But if we abstract away everything but the causes, we find that there’s no room for intentions any more. In a mechanistic world (even a quantum mechanistic one), autonomous intentions feel like magic. Something without a mechanistic cause. (Although, somehow Newtonian action at a distance seems to be ok. Is it because there’s math involved?)

How can anyone have any autonomy in their intentions when our conception of the very foundations of the world requires that everything is a part of a single causal chain? So we have a paradox built out of abstractions of two of our fundamental experiences of the world: Causal connectedness versus a sense of mental autonomy. In daily life, we don’t experience it as a paradox. But when we hypostasize these two experiences and try to make them into general abstract rules, the paradox emerges. Only one of these can be true: 1. Everything has a cause. 2. I can choose to do anything at will (on a whim). Yet, without both of these being true at the same time, our model of the world breaks down.

Under the Damocles sword of this paradox, we have seen centuries of effort to find the ultimate causes of our intentions, the subterranean drivers of all our actions hidden from our awareness, that only science or some other kind of exorcism can reveal. We have Freud looking for them in childhood protosexual experiences, Jung finding them in some sort of a racial memory, Skinner reducing them to operant conditioning, evolutionary psychologists imagining them in the savannah of 50 thousand years ago.

In philosophy, we have the existentialists, who … You know what, god knows what the existentialists are thinking. But they’re sure very concerned about our autonomy and embeddedness in the world. Dasein comes into it somewhere, I hear.

So given all of this, how can we determine absolute autonomous intentionality in a machine, if we can’t even be a hundred percent sure that we have completely autonomous intentions ourselves? We have loads of models and stories that undermine our intentional autonomy. Or at least the intentional autonomy of people we don’t like. We speak of brainwashing by evil regimes, evil corporations, evil environment, evil liberals, evil conservatives, evil Christians, evil Muslims, evil education system. Is there anybody out there who has not been accused of brainwashing someone?

So, to take us back to the question I suggested above? Can it actually reveal autonomous intentionality? Well, no. But it can certainly reveal bounded autonomous intentionality that some people call goal directedness. The ability to make a plan in the pursuance of a goal that consists of sub-goals and so on… And whether all of that will at some point emerge into something that fits neatly into our stories about sentience is anybody’s guess. But it’s certainly not there yet.

Some acknowledgements of intellectual debts

I’m aware of Searl’s book ‘Intentionality’ and although I’ve never read it, I’ve heard him speak about its topics a few times.

I’ve been thinking about the fundamental paradox of autonomous intentionality in one way or another as far back as I can remember but I got turned on to some of the more interesting questions regarding the near conspiracy-theory-level suspicion about the mind by Feyerabend in ‘Conquest of Abundance’.

My first encounter with the notion of embodiment was in Lakoff’s treatment of categories (still underappreciated). He also has the richest treatment of the richness of what is involved even in the most routine cognition. More recently, I have been thinking about embodiment from the perspective of Gibson’s direct perception and ecological psychology.

Learning is a Journey: Consequences of a metaphor

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

How to read this

This will take about 18 minutes to read (at 230 words/min) but the text is structured to make it easy to jump around and find the key points faster. I tend to go into more detail than most people find necessary.
Two reasons to read:
- Explore a different perspective on some aspects of teaching and learning
- See an illustration of a generative metaphor analysis
The two main sections can be read independently
- Metaphor breakdown (12 mins)
  - Includes a table summarising key comparisons, this can be read instead of the detailed breakdown
- Overall lessons (5 mins)
  - Includes an aside on two modes of education (2 mins) that can be skipped
There are also paragraphs on (they are not necessary to understand the main point):
- method of metaphor analysis (1 min) and
- usefulness of metaphor for learning (1 min)
This can be read in sequence or in parts - the order matters but you can circle around

Note: This was initially written as part of a discussion about how to best organise learning support but it got out of hand. It should be comprehensible on its own.

Journey metaphor breakdown (12 mins)

Learning is a journey. A common saying. But if we take the metaphor seriously, how can we change the way we think about learning as well as teaching? If learning is a journey, what do we know about journeys that can help us rethink some aspects of learning?

A journey is an activity that takes place over time and space. Something that requires both preparation, guidance and effort. Here I want to focus on the preparation and guidance that we can easily project onto the sort of preparation and guidance we offer learners.

A traveller can get broadly four types of support to make their journey successful.

Map
Itinerary
Briefing
Guide

These types of support can be utilised simultaneously, or in sequence (any order), before setting out or while en route. Are there useful analogues in teaching and learning? Can we learn something new about both?

Note on method

To help us tap the potential of the metaphor, we need to contrast two domains of knowledge. Our source domain is journey and our target domain is learning. We then project them onto one another and see if something interesting pops up. We can proceed in three steps:

Lay out the salient features of the source domain that could be relevant to a comparison.
Find areas in the target domain that seem to map onto the source domain. Be explicit about the mappings and their consequences.
Finally, it is essential to find places where the metaphor breaks down. There are many things about a journey that do not help us when thinking about learning and some may be actively harmful.

It is easy to just put a metaphor out there and let it sit. But to learn from it, it is important to do the hard work.

See Hacking a metaphor in five steps for more about the method and How (not) to explain anything with metaphor for more about the importance of understanding both the source and target domains.

Map

What is relevant about maps

Maps are created to describe the territory or ‘lay of the land’ from a particular perspective and for a particular purpose. They both simplify and systematise. They differ in the level of detail (scale), they make choices about what features of the terrain to capture and which to leave out.

Maps reflect the logic of the territory and the perspective taken, but they do not reflect the sequence in which the territory was uncovered. They may imply a particular direction of travel but do not specify it.

Maps can be consulted independently of a journey but the amount of understanding of the territory will be limited without actually visiting the area in person. They are much less useful to someone who is familiar with the area but may still reveal important relationships that may not be obvious to someone who only knows a place by visiting.

Reading a map is a skill. Some people are better than others at using maps for actual journeys. Some people are very good at plotting journeys on maps but are not very good at choosing the direction of travel when confronted with the reality of the actual terrain. (I am one of those).

But maps have a purpose to explain particular aspects of the terrain within the limitations of their format. Perhaps the most extreme case is the famous London Tube map which is only interested in connections between stations but not time or distance on the surface. Roadmaps may contain areas of water but nothing about navigating through the water. A sailor (and it has happened, twice) who will use the road atlas to navigate British waters will be in real danger.

How it applies to teaching/learning

In teaching and learning, the equivalent of maps are textbooks or manuals. They are also written to expose the logic of the subject matter as it is understood by the author or a community to which the author belongs. They will choose the level of detail and they will keep in mind the purpose of their reader.

A textbook or a manual has limits for independent learning without some engagement with the subject matter. Some books may be more or less detailed and explicit but without some further action, the learning is limited.

However, like maps, textbooks are essential to help us understand the relationship between concepts and as a reference while we’re getting used to the new domain. They will be referred to less as the domain becomes familiar but may still reward a reference as a reminder of a particular perspective on the domain or a less familiar corner of it.

Like maps, textbooks and manuals have no concept of time. They may imply ‘time to read’ through thickness but not time to learn. In fact, like maps, they may mislead us and suggest to us that we understand something better than we actually do.

Also, like with maps, reading a textbook is a skill. Even somebody who is a very proficient reader of narrative fiction or even just magazines, may struggle to make the most out of a textbook or a piece of academic writing intended for learning.

This is even more pronounced with instruction manuals. Two people can read the same manual for setting up a computer, drilling into a wall, or cooking a meal, and come up with very different results. It is important to know what to pay attention to, understand where the manual is taking a shortcut, where it’s assuming prior knowledge, what are the conventions of structuring the information, etc. Exam instructions are one well-known example.

Like maps, textbooks may also take shortcuts and it is dangerous to assume otherwise. Repairing a car after only reading an engineering textbook would not be any wiser than trying to sail around the UK with a road map. This is an extreme scenario, but many more subtle ones exist.

Where the metaphor breaks down

Unlike maps, textbooks or guidance manuals are more linear in a way that may imply a particular direction of travel. They are also not structured in a way that allows easy navigation. Maps do not contain a narrative although it may be provided in an accompanying text.

Reading a map requires a different type of skill than reading a book and different kind of people will be able to benefit from them.

Maps are much less ‘authorial’, while they do have style and genre, the creator is much less prominent. This may be true of some textbooks and manuals but not of others.

There is also a difference in the amount of time, a reader expects to engage with a map when compared to a textbook. Maps are much more iconic in the sense that their layout represent some features of the terrain. In textbooks and manuals (unless they contain illustrations), everything is mediated through language.

Creating a map requires much narrower and more specialised skill set than textbook making. Almost anybody who has taught a subject can write a textbook (and many people who haven’t). But perhaps, even though, this is not a good match, we should think a bit more carefully about the skill sets of creators of textbooks and manuals.

One reason is that the quality of a map is much easier to check than the quality of a textbook.

Itinerary

What is relevant about itineraries

Itinerary is a description of a particular journey through a map. The most important feature of an itinerary is time. It starts from the perspective that the traveller only has a certain amount of time and proposes particular path through the territory as described by a map. It will be explicit about how long it will take from point A to point B.

An itinerary will also often suggest activities to do at different points of the journey. It will note points of interest along the way. It may also fill in more detail in certain parts that the map leaves unmentioned (for instance, where the road may be particularly hard to travel on). It may even suggest equipment necessary or think in terms of means of transport. It may offer shortcuts.

There may be multiple itineraries available for journeying to the same destination or even through the same points. They will usually differ on how much time they take or what the traveller may expect to do at different points. There may also be alternative itineraries based on the travellers’ skill, physical fitness or equipment available.

The itinerary will rely on the existence of the map for traveller to understand broader relationships. It may often contain snippets of the map to illustrate the layout of particular points.

It may be of note that historically, itineraries predate maps by millennia. There are few ancient maps but many itineraries. Also, the skill of making maps is significantly more specialised than of itineraries. And finally, map making has changed much more with technology and developments in science than itinerary creation has.

How it applies to teaching and learning

There is no one natural equivalent to itineraries in the domain of teaching and learning. But perhaps this may lead us to come creative ways of developing some. (The introductory section is one such attempt when compared to the table of contents which would be analogous to the map.)

The closest to an itinerary is the ‘curriculum’, but this is more a guide to the ‘teacher’ than the learner. A curriculum is more like a leaflet from a tour company about what to expect (which may be called an itinerary) but it is not sufficient for someone to undertake the journey alone with a map. A curriculum will usually contain reference to time but it will be ‘institutional time’ related to a particular course of study. A good itinerary will think in terms of ‘journey time’ and will pay attention to the demands of the territory and may even take into account an individual travellers capabilities.

Some books sometimes contain suggestions as to how to read them to achieve different goals. And sometimes people write independent guides to reading a particular book or a series of books to achieve a result. But this is relatively rare and also leaves time and sequence implicit.

What we need is to provide more explicit itineraries for learners that acknowledge time as a point of departure. Specifying things like: this is what you should do if you have 6 hours over six weeks. We can then offer alternative itineraries through the domain of knowledge and skill we are interested in depending on the time, interest, skill and prior knowledge of the learner.

Where the metaphor breaks down

Itineraries (like curricula) can be much more explicit about journey time because it is given by the territory and means of transport. They are much easier to construct and a traveller can be certain that they will complete the journey in the specified amount of time and will have completed the ‘journey’ at the end if they follow the steps. The journey is both the means and the end.

This is the downfall of many curricula and collections of learning outcomes. They conflate the journey through the learning process to the learning itself. But learning requires more than simply walking along a particular path. Perhaps a learning itinerary should be more like instructions to a treasure hunt, where certain points along the path require more effort and simply following the steps does not guarantee success.

Finally, itineraries are much more bounded by the territory. There’s a limit to the level of detail in which a traveller can explore a territory but a domain of knowledge and skill is much more open ended.

It is an open question whether the same relationship exists between learning itineraries and textbook as does between maps and itineraries. Itineraries are much easier to make than maps, but it seems to me that it is the other way around with textbooks.

Briefing

What is relevant about a briefing

A pre-trip briefing is an in-person presentation to a group of travellers about what to expect on the journey. It will refer to the map and/or an itinerary.

Participants in the briefing can ask questions, they can consult with each other before setting out, they can form groups who will travel together.

But ultimately they will be left to undertake the journey on their own without further assistance along the way.

How it applies to teaching and learning

The closest parallel to a pre-trip briefing is a training session or a course. It usually happens in small (or large groups) at some remove from the actual activity it is meant to prepare for. It sets out the key concepts, guides attendees through any learning materials. However, the attendance in the session itself is only a precursor to learning.

The metaphor can be very helpful because often we confuse attendance in a training session with learning itself. This would be equivalent to equating a pre-trip briefing with the journey itself. The lesson for creating teaching sessions should then be that they should include a focus on how the learning journey should proceed rather than just a description of the territory.

Often a course will be designed to provide training sessions along the learning journey with work expected to be done in between. Somewhat like a series of briefings before every stage of a race. But much of the work is often left implicit and the only feedback the trainer gets is whether participants have understood the briefing, not whether they achieved the destination along a route.

Where the metaphor breaks down

Unlike a pre-trip briefing, a course or a class may involve (but often doesn’t) a certain amount of practice that results to learning. This would be similar to the pre-trip briefing facilitator walking with its participants for a part of the journey.

Guide

What is relevant about a guide

A journey is a very different experience when the traveller is following an actual human guide (rather than a written one). The guide may highlight points of interest, warn of upcoming difficulties, make choices about alternative routes, etc. The traveller can show up with little or no preparation and simply follow.

There are limits to where and how much following a guide is possible. Just because they have a guide, a traveller cannot simply follow into a terrain for which they are not prepared. Almost anybody can follow a guide through a city or a long countryside path. But climbing a mountain or rafting down a river requires preparation.

The guide may help in other ways. They may carry some of the travellers baggage, or they may cook food. They will also negotiate with other people encountered along the way.

But most importantly, a guide also provides emotional support for the traveller. This can be implicit through a feeling of security. Or it can be explicit when the guide provides encouragement or reassurance.

How it applies to teaching and learning

There are two possible equivalents to a guided tour in learning and teaching: 1. consultancy and 2. coaching.

A consultant will give advice as to what to do next and may even do some of the work themselves. They will point out possible alternative courses of action and they will help make the decision about which one to make. Sometimes a consultant may do some of the required work themselves to help the work move at a required pace. A consultant can help a group as easily as an individual.

A coach will focus less on the journey itself and more on the change in the traveller along the journey. They will do many of the same things a consultant will do but they will stress the need for their charge to develop skills necessary to travel on their own next time. Unlike a consultant, a coach will mostly work with an individual or when working with a group will spend time with each individual.

But as with guides, we must not forget about the emotional benefit having a coach or a consultant can offer. Learning something new leaves us vulnerable. We are exposed to a new and confusing experience which is uncomfortable and can even be harmful to mental health in some high stakes situations. Particularly to some people who are more susceptible. Having somebody to ‘put the hand on the tiller’ or simply offer encouragement, can be just as important as the advice they impart.

Where the metaphor breaks down

Whereas a guided tour can take place anywhere, both coaching and consultancy are traditionally suited only to certain subject areas or domains of expertise. But perhaps we could expand their reach.

With most guided tours, any change in the participant will be accidental. The journey will be completed simply by following the guide. The guided tour attendees may even learn less than somebody who just wanders around without any guidance at all.

However, with consultancy or coaching, the aim is change and increase in capabilities and independence. The destination is quite distinct from the journey. Even if the journey is necessary, ‘journey is more important than the destination’ applies less.

This has implications for the difference between the amount of skill and training required in the two different settings. Anybody who knows an area can be a guide. A city tour guide will require some training in local knowledge but not in walking and having people follow them. Consultants are much more like this but coaches require so much more skill than that. Which is perhaps why there are so many fewer of them outside specialised areas.

Comparison chart

Type of support	Journey	Teaching and learning
Map / Textbook or manual	Map Represents the logic of the territory Does not reflect the logic of discovery Allows multiple ways of interaction Can differ at level of detail (zoom level) Is limited in how much of the terrain can be understood just by consulting it Map user Needs to learn conventions of map making Needs to be aware of maps purpose and limitation Map creator High level of skill and training Deep knowledge of area assisted by technology	Textbook Outlines the logic of the subject Does not reflect logic of discovery Will differ in level of detail based on level May suggest direction and sequence of learning May contain some learning activities Is limited in how much can be learned from it without other activities Textbook user Benefits from skills on how to learn from a textbook Can be confused into thinking textbook is complete Textbook creator Does not receive specialised training Requires knowledge of area and some understanding of learners' need
Itinerary / Syllabus or learning objectives	Itinerary One path out of many Driven by time need to travel Alternatives may be possible May rely on map Provides rich information in select places Often focused on independent travel Itinerary user Follows each step Requires less skill than map Itinerary creator Anybody with knowledge of area Less skill than a map maker	Syllabus Assumes the presence of a teacher Rarely intended for independent learning Not detailed or rich in information Rarely provides alternatives Driven by time provided by institution Will refer to a textbook Syllabus user Teacher more than a learner Will not refer to it very often Syllabus creator No special skill required
Briefing / Training session	Happens before journey Individual or small groups Journey is very distinct from briefing Is accompanied by reference to maps and itineraries Little experience of training required for briefing giver	Happens as part of learning Sometimes as the only opportunity for learning Always in groups (small to large)
Guide / Consultant or coach	Takes the traveller through the entire journey Points out important parts of the journey Helps make decisions about direction of travel or changes Sometimes performs some tasks instead of the traveller Provides sense of security or emotional support	Consultant Works with consultee through every step Does some of the work for the consultee Helps make decisions about changes in action Coach Points out deficiency in performance Adjusts improvement plan based on progress

Overall lessons (5 mins)

There are some overall lessons we can learn from this metaphor break down:

We do not have enough detailed itineraries in education.
We often confuse what is the preparation for learning, with the learning itself.

Lack of itineraries

Finding an analogue for a rich, detailed itinerary, was the most difficult of all the four mappings. We have lots of maps and briefings, but very few itineraries that do more than inform the traveller about stops on the way. Those are the curricula and syllabi. But they are really much more an itinerary for the teacher, not the learner.

How can itineraries help

I think there may be a great benefit to creating more itineraries for the learners that will help them navigate the journey itself. We are good at producing guidance that maps the territory. But much less good at suggesting ways through the territory that the map often leaves implicit.

Can we find answers that are analogous to questions such as these:

How long are we expecting a learning journey will take?
What are the points of interest along the way?
What can the traveller do to take short cuts or scenic routes?
Where are the steep hills, the challenging climbs, and treacherous descents?
What should we not forget to do at particular spots?

Time

But perhaps the most important information an itinerary can give us is how long every step should take. We understand that the exact time will vary for everyone but having some idea of what is necessary is helpful.

But when we assign homework, readings or suggest some other activity, we almost never suggest how long it should take. The one exception is training in sports and sometimes music. But this could be a feature of all instruction.

The problem is that because time is so often left unspecified, we don’t actually know how long things take. We know how long lessons take because of scheduling and we suggest things like ‘you should study 3 hours for every hour in class’.

But we never say things like ‘to understand this concept, you should think about this for 10 minutes every day in this particular way and repeat it five times’. Yet, it is possible that this is what sets apart successful learners. They simply figured out a way to do this.

Aside: Two modes of teaching

Interestingly, this has been identified as a difference between “Western” and “Eastern” education (or rather their stereotypes). I’m going to call them the Map mode and the Itinerary mode.

In reality, both modes are present in both the Eastern and Western traditions (or rather the many more traditions spread across a vast continuum). But the stereotypes can help us see the contrasts, advantages and pitfalls of both modes.

An instructor in the “Map mode” will be describing the map and what the destination looks like. It is as if the description were enough to magically transport the traveller to the destination. This is the image of the lecturer at a lectern.

The failure mode of this approach is a student who sees what they want to learn but have no idea of how to get there. An obverse of this is a teacher trying to explain the same thing in yet another way, being frustrated with the students not learning.

In the extreme, the assumption built into this approach is that everyone is the same. Simply put everyone in the same room (or a MOOC), tell them things, and they will know them. And that’s how you do education at scale.

In the “Itinerary mode”, the focus will be on the path, the journey that everybody has to travel through. Here we don’t have an instructor, we have a guide who points us in a certain direction and tells us to pay attention to how we step. Here the image is of the yogi telling us to focus on our breath as we try to get a better understanding of how things fit together. Or in the extreme, the Zen master who will try to give us push in the right direction with a koan.

The failure mode here is the student begging the master to say something specific. Describe what the destination will look like.

In the extreme, the teacher in this mode assumes that everybody is maximally different. Everyone needs to travel their individual path and the path will change as they go along it. This does not necessarily scale very well. Nor does it take advantage of the many similarities between different individuals who can’t learn the lessons of the many who trod the journey before them.

Preparation and the journey

“The map is not the territory” goes a famous saying. Yet, in education we often behave as if maps were all the were needed. Journeys are an afterthought. Thus we lecture, we give explanations, we write books about every conceivable topic.

These things are necessary, but they are obviously not sufficient. And of course, we understand that learning takes time. We append seminars or labs to our lectures, tutorials to our readings, homework to go with our explanations. But these are always somehow secondary to the “main thing”.

And then we go and complain about lectures (even though, not books, for some reason) and try to replace them with more ‘interactive’ activities. But those are still in the preparation mode, not the travel mode. We think of education as a series of explanations interrupted by periods of inactivity.

But the journey metaphor can perhaps help us to flip it around. We can think of learning as a processes punctuated by a series of explanations. But the explanations are just a part of the preparation for the next step in the process.

The ‘flipped classroom’ idea hints at this but ultimately, it still thinks of learning as very event based. It tries to say ‘read the pre-trip briefing yourself and then come to class and we will walk together’. And not infrequently a better metaphor for the in-class activity is carrying some people who did not bring the right gear on the trip.

Note on the benefits of metaphor

Was the journey metaphor necessary for any of this. Not really. We could have come up with all these ideas about learning without it. And many people have. I myself have been thinking myself along these lines for a while without the journey metaphor. But the journey metaphor gave us a structure and a different way of talking about learning.

Learning is learning and journeys are journeys. They are more different than they are similar. But for a moment, thinking of them as essentially one thing, was a useful exercise.

3 fundamental problems of translating metaphor (or anything else)

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

How hard is it to translate metaphor?

Metaphor seems like it should be very difficult to translate. But I’d like to argue that what is difficult about translating it is not the metaphor part but rather how it is used. This makes it no different from any other aspect of language. But because it is a rather salient use of language, we can use it to illustrate these general problems of translation.

I have summarised these into three broad classes of problems that a translator has to deal with day in and day out.

Idiomaticity and conventionality
Knowledge and underdetermination
Coherence and cohesion

What is and is not a metaphor?

But first, let’s establish what I mean by metaphor. Drawing on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, I use metaphor to stand for any non-literal or figurative use of language where two domains of knowledge are projected onto one another to create a new meaning containing parts of both domains. For example, the term computer virus is a result of the medical domain being projected into the domain of computers to create a new concept.

This covers a lot of traditional tropes including simile, analogy, allegory, or even hyperbole or irony. On this definition, they are just different surface representations of metaphor. (Sometimes, metonymy can be also included here).

So I may say, ‘John’s a beast’ (metaphor) or ‘John’s like a beast’ (simile) and there’s a difference in meaning because of how they are expressed. But the conceptual work that goes into understanding what goes on is the same. We confront what we know or don’t know about John with what we know about what is meant by ‘beast’ and form a different impression of John.

The same goes for hyperbole: If I say, ‘Startled, Irene jumped 10 feet high.’ I’m using this domain of height to express the intensity of her feelings. Or irony/sarcasm: “Fred’s a real Einstein”, I’m using the domain of ‘clever scientist’ to project onto Fred (who supposedly isn’t), to create a contrast.

Of course, in translation, the surface representations do matter. For example, as we’ll see below, sometimes the projection of two domains can be translated directly when expressed as a simile and has to be worked around when expressed as a conventional metaphor. But we can best think of these issues in the framework of the three general problems of translation rather than as a special type of problem due to their metaphoricity.

Problem 1. Idiomaticity and conventionality

The fundamental problem for all translation is that actual language use is a not a matter of just combining words according to some rules of grammar. There is a whole other set of conventions about when and how to use certain words and rules. Sometimes, this is a matter of propriety. So you have to know, not to call your teacher ‘dude’ as a matter of social convention. But most often the convention means that certain words used together, the whole has a different meaning than it would if we just combined the meanings of the individual words.

These are called idioms. Often, colourful expressions like ‘kick the bucket’ or ‘the whole nine yards’ are given as examples. But these are easy. The problem is that language is idiomatic all the way down. The words ‘put’ and ‘up’ have certain meanings but there’s no way you can figure out the meaning of ‘I will not put up with you’ or ‘I will put you up with Jane’ without knowing the convention behind them or at least getting enough context.

Most of any language depends on this kind of convention. And most of the metaphors people deal with in translation are also to some extent conventional. So, if I say ‘don’t eat like a pig’ in English, I mean don’t eat so much. In Czech, it means ‘don’t eat messily’. We have the domain of humans eating and pigs eating. That comes with certain imagery of what it looks like and what happens during, before and after. But when we use a metaphor, we are choosing what parts of the domains to project onto one another. And with metaphors that have been conventionalised, different languages and cultures choose different things.

This means that very novel and flashy metaphors and similes are often the easiest to translate. I still remember reading “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.” in the Czech translation of a Raymond Chandler novel. And it was very easy for me to google the original now. Because the sort of conceptual work Chandler is doing here is completely original and yet entirely understandable. This might be more difficult if translating into a language that does not have concepts for tarantula or angel food cake but it would be trivial to come up with a combination that does an equivalent job.

But because of their conventionality, idioms pose a core problem for the translator, namely picking an equivalent level of conventionality or idiomaticity. I still remember reading in a Western adventure book in my youth a lumberjack calling somebody what to me sounded like a novel curse ‘You god forsaken son of a female dog’ (zatracený čubčí synu). That made it sound like the character was trying to evoke rich imagery through linguistic innovation but I’m pretty sure the original simply had ‘You damn son of a bitch’. The translator simply kept the imagery of the original but did not take into account that it would sound novel to a Czech reader whereas it was entirely conventional in English.

Conventionality can also fly under the radar, blurring the lines between grammar and usage. For instance, ‘a bird singing in the tree’ will be translated as ‘on the tree’ (na stromě) into Czech. English conceptualises the tree as a container whereas Czech as a surface. In Czech, ‘in the tree’ would mean inside the trunk. Both languages have the same conceptual distinction between ‘in’ and ‘on’ but by convention they apply it differently to birds and trees. Equally, an English speaker introducing themselves on the phone will say ‘This is Hana’ but a Czech speaker will say ‘Here is Hana’. Both languages focus on the difference in perspective and distance but one will point at the person and the other at the location. These two examples are not ‘figurative’ in the rhetorical sense but they are conceptual. However, the way they conceptualise the world is a matter of convention, not pure grammar and lexicon.

Problem 2. Knowledge and underdetermination

Conventionality is the underlying matrix of all language in use. But it leads to an even more difficult problem which is underdetermination. Different languages leave different things unexpressed and assume you can figure it out from context. Others require that the speaker always be explicit about that same thing.

For example, languages such as English, German or Spanish have definite articles which specify whether we are talking about something specific or general. But most other languages don’t. There’s a big difference between ‘a horse walked into the barn’ and ‘the horse walked into the barn’. Languages without a definite article can express this difference when it really matters but often leave it implicit. But English always has to express it even when it does not matter in a particular context. Which means a language like Czech or Russian is underdetermined when it comes to definiteness.

So the speakers (and translators) have to rely on knowledge of context, culture or some other area of expertise to make sense of what goes on. And as we saw with the ‘pig’ example, metaphors are underdetermined by their very nature. When we call somebody a ‘pig’ we are not saying they have a little curly tail. We are picking some other similarity. So as a speaker of the language, I have to know not just what a pig looks and behaves like but also the convention of the culture about what aspect of pigness we compare humans to.

But I also have to know enough about the person being called a pig to understand what is meant. So a man could be called a pig because they are annoying (often with sexual undertones) or because he is very fat. Sometimes a bit of both. The expression is underdetermined as to the exact meaning.

When I try to translate that expression, I may not have a similar expression that covers both eventualities. In Czech, calling a man ‘a pig’ without any specification would specify some of the annoyingness (with sexual undertones) but is also underdetermined when it comes to messiness. However, it does not imply fatness. So, if I wanted to specify fatness, I’d have to use a simile ‘he’s fat like a pig’ which overdetermines the original expression. Meaning, I have to pick from multiple underdetermined meanings in the original and pick one.

This requires quite rich knowledge, but it can never be done perfectly. Asking the original speaker what they meant often does not help. Because their language is underdetermined, they may not have wanted to commit to one meaning or another. They may not even have been aware that such a commitment was possible. Their language did not require them to make a choice, so they didn’t make one.

That’s why translation can sometimes reveal faulty reasoning and can sometimes go terribly wrong. And that’s why translators so often agonise over how much of themselves to insert into the translation. Sometimes they have to say more than the author intended and sometimes they cannot say as much.

Problem 3. Cohesion and coherence

So far, we were only looking at metaphors in isolation. But they (as any expression) are always a part of a larger text and context. And the text has to hang together (cohesion) and make sense in context (coherence). This is why it is often more difficult to translate shorter texts than entire volumes. When somebody asks me to translate something, I always want to know the whole sentence and ideally the whole paragraph.

Texts have to be cohesive locally as well as globally. They have to make sense and their different parts have to connect to each other. Otherwise they would just be lists. This connective tissue of text is built up from different types of constructions. For example, there are connectives like ‘thus’, ‘but’, ‘however’ that establish causal or other logical relationships between parts of the text. But the most important is anaphora which is used to point back (and sometimes forward) in the text to establish a relationship between different parts.

This can be done in all sorts of ways. Pronouns as in “Aisha went into battle. She won. Her soldiers revered her.” But often this is just done by repetition (which is often alternates with pronouns). So the next sentence in the previous example may go like this: “And Aisha deserved their respect, because she took good care of her soldiers.”

Cohesion is not the same in all languages or genres. Sometimes, repetition is avoided or even forbidden, sometimes it is encouraged or required, some languages require more specific causal signalling than others. In other words, we see echoes of the problems of conventionality and underdetermination raising their head.

But if that were all, cohesion would not require a special mention. The problem for the translator and particularly the translator dealing with metaphor is that cohesion is not always very straightforwardly textual. It relies not just on what was said but also on what else is known.

This is particularly the case with so called ‘anaphoric islands’. They are a sort of metonymic phenomenon. For example, ‘I speak Russian, but I’ve never been there’. ‘There’ refers to ‘Russia’ which was never mentioned but is metonymically linked to the language of ‘Russian’. This example itself would not cause a problem for the translator. But when the metonymy becomes enmeshed with metaphor, it often is. Because we can now link together not just things from one domain but from two.

For example, take ‘The band exploded onto the scene, and the reverberations are still being felt today.” Here the author is taking the domain of explosions in the initial conventional metaphor and draws on it some more by taking other images from what happens after the explosion. But the translator may not have been able to translate the initial idiom using the same domain in explosion. For example, in Czech you can only use the word for ‘explode’ (vybouchnout) to mean the equivalent of the English ‘bomb on stage’. So, the domain of explosions was never activated and reverberations would make no sense.

This sort of thing is not that difficult to overcome within a single sentence but sometimes the entire text is built around a metaphor that only shares some of the domain across languages. So the translator may have to leave things out or try to make up a completely different metaphor and hope it will not distort the meaning of the original too much. Journalistic and academic texts are often full of these structuring metaphors and it is almost impossible to keep up with them throughout the text.

Side note: Notice how the subtle grammatical difference makes all the difference between metaphor and literal language. ‘Exploded onto the scene’ is very different from ‘exploded on the scene’.

All the other problems of translation

Translation is hard. And it is impossible if we expect perfect translation that goes both ways. If we imagine that a hypothetical perfect translator translates a text from L1 to L2, we would expect another hypothetical perfect translator to be able to take that text in L2 and translate it back to L1 and the we could get the exact same result as the original. That is only possible on the simplest of texts. But if we went back and forth a lot, threw in some other languages into the mix, we would be fairly far from the original.

All the different problems of conventionality, underdetermination and cohesion would compound so that we would see a very different text. But at the same time, it is not that hard. Because we could probably by and large keep the basics together. As we know, the Bible is a translation of a translation and it’s not all that different across languages. But it did take teams of careful translators with deep knowledge of the original and its context years or even decades to complete. Which is in great contrast to most of the translation done by hurried, underpaid and often underinformed translators.

Language is so redundant that bad translations make less difference than one might think. It is remarkable how many mistranslations there are in subtitles or dubbings of popular TV shows and people still love them. I’m sure there are legal documents, psychological texts and more that also contain mistranslations. Sometimes they can be consequential but often they’re not.

My favourite childhood book was the The Coot Club by Arthur Ransome. In it, some children are learning to sail and they are spending a lot of time naming the sides of the boat. These are ‘port’ and ‘starboard’ in English and they are notoriously difficult to learn. But in Czech they are simply left side (levobok) and right side (pravobok). Children often confuse left and right, so it makes sense that they would make some errors. But I still remember thinking as a child that these kids were particularly dimwitted. Furthermore, two characters (twins) had nicknames ‘Port’ and ‘Starboard’ which was simply rendered into Czech as ‘Lefty’ and ‘Righty’ and it was never connected with the nautical term. There is nothing the translator could have done to rescue all the internal connections and cultural allusions in the text. And still I liked the books so much that I actually moved to Norfolk where the action took place.

There are many many more sub-categories of problems that translators have to deal with. But most of them could be thought through the lens of one of the three I mentioned. Translating figurative languages is hard but only because translation is hard. It is impossible to convey every little nuance, turn of phrase, hint and allusion without a lot of footnotes. Fiction is harder to translate than non-fiction, short pithy phrases are harder to translate than sprawling texts. Translation is hard. Metaphors are hard. But we still get by.

Background

I wrote this after attending the conference on Metaphors in Translation. I was disappointed that nobody was thinking of metaphor as a complex category.

Summary of main points

Metaphor on its own is not a special problem for translation but it requires lots of background knowledge on the part of the translator.
The key issues for any translation that are just as important for metaphor as anything else are:
1. Idiomaticity of many expressions that requires finding an equivalent expression not using the same words because of different conventions
2. Underdetermination that requires the translator to fill in or take out something in the original text (often because of the idiomatic convention difference between the two languages)
3. Cohesion where a metaphor or some other conventional expression is referred to throughout the text in different ways that are impossible to replicate in both languages.
Because of the issues above, it is impossible to create a perfect translation in such a way that two ‘perfect’ translators, one translating a text from L1 to L2 and the other then translating the text back from L2 to L1, would get back to the exact replica of the original. This is especially true for figurative language of all kind but there are elements of figurativeness in all language.

World as a directly meaningful place: A comment on Ecological Psychology and the richness of human experience

Sun, 14 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Background - From comment to blog post

I just finished reading Andrew Wilson's series of blog posts on the foundation of 'ecological psychology' This post started as a comment but it was too long for the comment field (and at 1800 words, that's not a surprise), so I'm posting it here. It is a bit rough and in places, it expects, that you know what the original posts say. I added some quotes for context but the original posts are still worth a read. But even on its own, I think this post lays out the argument for the need of a more robust psychological account of the human experience.

When I read this in the first post of the series "we must make the world a meaningful place", I was sold. I'd been sold on this idea for a long time. I am particularly taken with this "the world does present itself in behaviourally relevant terms".

Ecological psychology in a nutshell

Wilson summarises the overall thrust of 'ecological psychology' as follows:

The ecological approach is a theory of direct perception. Put simply, direct perception proposes that our perceptual experience of the world is not mediated by anything that sits between the world and that experience.

This is intriguing as a proposition and there's a lot to recommend it. In fact, I'd been reading up on ecological psychology because of this recently. But I have not seen an account that can actually live up to the promise. So I dove into the series with high hopes which the introductory post only encouraged.

But as I continued reading the series, I was getting increasingly dismayed as we were getting farther and farther away from anything that seemed like meaningfulness in any meaningful sense. This is my problem with ecological psychology when I encounter it in practice - it's fighting battles at the margins of real problems. Do be honest, I don't care about whether, there is a plausible ontology behind direct perception. I'm interested in whether there is a plausible psychology behind it. Wilson spends a lot of time getting away from the idea of properties of objects in favour of dispositions - which include second order properties such as 'liftability' of an anvil or 'solubility' of salt. This paragraph lays out fairly clearly.

Objects in the physical environment are disposed to be acted on by an organism in some ways and not others. Those dispositions are higher-order properties of the object constituted by a particular arrangement of currently present material properties of the object, and we call these affordances. At the same time, organisms are disposed to be able to act on objects in some ways and not others. These dispositions are higher-order properties of the organism, constituted by a particular arrangement of currently present material properties of the organism, and we call these effectivities. Affordances and effectivities are just complementary dispositions, but we name them differently to keep track of them in our analysis, because it will matter which one we are talking about at any given time.

He stresses that affordances are not relational but dispositional. He then talks about the need for ecological information to solve the problem of us not being able to actually perceive things like the solubility of salt without the need for mental computation.

Ok, so we have the terms. But what can we do with them? Affordances as dispositions - fine. Ecological information - good. But let's resolve some real problems with "salt" for both representational and non-representational psychology.

Some problems with perceiving 'salt' - from shakers to angry villagers

Salt is salty. Saltiness is a disposition which my effectivity turns into an affordance (if I get the terms right). But what is happening when I'm reaching for some salt to put into my soup?

Saltiness is nowhere represented in the environment at that moment, yet, it is a part of that process. I'm reaching for it instead of pepper or sugar for a reason. The effectivity of my salt-tasting is a part of me whether I want it or not, but I had to learn that that's what salt does. That is so inherent to my lived experience of salt and saltiness that to think about it with some sort of 'mental representation' - script, schema, plan, frame - is as natural as breathing. But I have a problem. I am not running a structured search through some sort of a repository of frames nor doing a Bayesian probability match as I'm reaching for salt. Salt, as ecological psychology so intriguingly says, is directly meaningful to me. I am solving a task. But without, for lack of a better word, knowledge of salt and its properties, or dispositions, if you wish, it is stripped of all meaningfulness. In this context, renaming a property to a disposition is just doing a job of relabelling an established term without adding much in the way of new ideas. But there are other problems.
Another disposition of salt is its whiteness. This would be very important to me were I to be asked to pick out salt out of the carpet. But the whiteness of salt is a learned property. These days, there's apparently also Himalayan salt which is pink. When someone tells me to put the salt as I know it into a box labelled 'table salt' and the 'pink salt' into a box labelled 'Himalayan salt' that I never heard of before, something important is happening. When I'm performing those actions, both 'table' and 'Himalayan' become directly meaningful to me but their meaningfulness also includes the new labels, the fact of novelty, etc. And all of that is a part of my experience of them. I think that this again is not mediated by some algorithmic process of matching the perceived objects and conceived concepts to stored representations. It flies in the face of everything we know about the speed of processing and the limits of working memory. But the richness of, for lack of a better word, representation is a part of it. I literally could not accomplish the task without all of that (and much more) being involved. True, I could train a pigeon to do this without this sort of representation but it does not scale.
Of course, sometimes, I am doing something very similar to running a structured search through some stored representations. For some grains of salt, I may not be sure about whether the level of pinkness justifies it being classed as "Himalayan". So, I may hold it up against the light to examine it, look at it side by side with a more prototypical example of Himalayan or regular grains of salt. I may even ask someone near me to help adjudicate. I experience all of these computationally (that's why the computational metaphor of the mind precedes computers) but the inputs into the 'algorithms' I am perceiving are not computational. I think we can tell an ecological story about this but not without some account of explicit mental operations.
But I may not even be visually perceiving anything resembling salt. I may just be seeing a white porcelain object on the table with holes in the top of it. Ok, that seems straightforward enough, but I travel between countries a lot and some countries put salt in shakers with one hole and pepper in the shakers with three holes while others swap them around. So, I have to take that into account. Most of the time, I do this without deliberation - direct perception being in operation. But sometimes I pick wrong. I see pepper pouring out of the three holes I want salt from, I see the difference, figure out the problem, remind myself which country I'm in, and go on to pick the right shaker. Of course, this is not something anyone tells you when you cross the border, so I also had to figure out after I made this error a few times. And I have since talked to many people about it as an 'interesting' example of cross-cultural differences. (I am a riot at parties).

So, we have planning, reasoning, learning, error correction and people talking/writing/laughing about all of the above.

And that's even before we get things like metaphor - "I'm pretty salty about that" is a fairly new phrase (at least for me). But I heard that sentence recently for the first time and immediately knew what it meant. How did that instant knowledge come about. There's a new village being built nearby stirring a lot of controversy among the locals. It is going to be called 'Salt Cross' to allude to historical trade routes going through the area. Somebody on Facebook remarked that it's funny because both words describe how the locals feel about it. What's that all about?

Some theories: Phenomenology, language as a gesture, cognition, and conquest of abundance

When I'm navigating the world, all of that, for lack of a better word, 'conceptualising' is happening, as well. Deliberation, metaphors, arguments are also a part of a directly meaningful world and I am very interested in thinking of my experience of these as not being mediated by complex mixing and matching of abstract symbols. But I'm more likely to find robust treatments in works by a phenomenologist like Merleau-Ponty who talks of the experience of language being similar to brushing off a mosquito off of one's arm. Speaking a language is a sort of gesture on this account and I think there's a lot to recommend that framing.

But if we want to understand the world this gesture is interacting with, we have to take into account the sort of analysis Lakoff did in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things of words like mother or over. Radial categories and idealized cognitive models may not be objects and our brain may not be a sort of computer in which these objects are stored and operated on. But they do describe real experience of the world.

What's more, words, objects, or actions are never on their own. They always combine and recombine. They are differently meaningful to us in different contexts. Perceptually tiny differences have huge conceptual consequences. 'Salt of the Earth' and 'Salt the Earth' differ by but one word, yet, there's a world of a difference between them. I want to have a theory like conceptual integration by Fauconnier and Turner to make sense of these combinations. Ecological psychology can account for these changes when dealing with throwing or running after a football - but when it comes to language, something like constructions and blending seems like a better model. Many people try to formulate these models computationally, but this leaves out most of their richness and malleability. I think the 'ecological' perspective of direct meaning is much more fruitful here. But then ecological psychologists go around insisting that mental representations don't exist.

Unfortunately, the world is not always directly meaningful to us. It presents puzzles and problems. We take wrong paths, trip up, make mistakes of all sorts. When we pause and start to correct them, some sort of a different process kicks into place. Perhaps the most ignored part of Kahneman's book on Thinking Fast and Slow is that there may not actually be any such thing as 'system 1' and 'system 2' but we behave as if there were. We need to acknowledge that this is a part of our world, as well. Any theory of humans that sweeps this under the rug is as incomplete as one that puts it front and centre.

Feyerabend's last unfinished book was called 'Conquest of Abundance' and he described it as follows:

The book is intended to show how specialists and common people reduce the abundance that surrounds and confuses them, and the consequences of their actions.

Ecological psychology's program is attractive because it puts us right in the midst of this abundance as organisms. But it needs to do a better job of addressing problems outside a quite narrow set of disciplines. It is strongest in the fields of perception and motion but has very little to say about what we think of as cognition. There are some hints that this possible but it's not clear how we get from the basics to the higher level stuff.

The case of digital reading and computer interfaces

I'm currently looking at how people learn to read on digital devices. What is the transition from a printed medium with physical affordances to a digital medium with most affordances mediated by a symbolic interface?

And, of course, we can't just account for the user's behaviour and call the job done. We also have to have a plausible ecological story to tell about the designers of the interfaces (not to speak of the engineers designing the hardware). All of these people (users, designers, trainers) live in a meaningful world surrounded not just by objects and interfaces to be perceived. They are embedded in what I've started calling the "zone of proximal capabilities" (as riff on Vygotsky). They ask friends, show colleagues, follow examples, test theories, make and watch videos on YouTube, read books about good design, etc. An ecological theory that does not take this into account has a very impoverished view of the environment in which the human organism is situated.

I can see how a symbolic account would be appealing. But it fails the mosquito test. All that I described is not mediated, it is as directly available to us, as the action of swatting a mosquito. Once it is learned, that is. And these things have history. Social history. Using the mouse to drag objects on the screen, pinching to zoom on the phone. These are all a part of our direct perception of the environment. But they weren't always. Now interface designers can count on this and that's further changing the environment and its affordances. However, we also need to keep in mind that the ability to navigate that environment is not uniform across the population (just like with the physical environment) and that's why people like me have a job. So that's another thing to solve.

Explaining this joke about Pavlov is a prerequisite for any theory of psychology

I have a new favourite joke courtesy of Reddit:

Pavlov is sitting at the bar drinking a beer. Someone walks in and it rings a bell over the door. Pavlov jumps up, slaps his head and cries out: "Shit, I forgot to feed the dogs."

I think the joy of this joke is direct, unmediated by a cognitive process. But it also makes no sense without an account of many layers of richly structured knowledge acquired over time in a social as well as physical environment. And as the comments on Reddit indicate, this knowledge cannot be taken for granted. And reconciling that directness of the experience with that sort of rich account of 'knowledge' with all its social consequences is what I want from any theory of psychology claiming to account for a "world as a meaningful place".

History as weather: A fractal theory of history for Ian Morris, Jared Diamond and CGP Grey

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Note: This post originally appeared on Medium in 2016. This a very lightly revised version with new formatting for ease of readability. It preceded the post on historical revisionism and anthropology of family but it tackles and elaborates on some of the same themes.

Outline of the argument

History is often accused of not being sufficiently scientific. To remedy this people try to come up with all sorts of theories of history that try to look like science. They come up with some measurable variable (e.g. availability of domesticable species as Jared Diamond did or energy output as Ian Morris did or size of population, advancement of technology, size of armies, etc. as many others do). This, they hope, explains the past and predicts the future.

Based on the theories, the would-be-scientist-historians build models that seem to make perfect sense but seemingly fall apart when overtaken by events. This makes history seem like it’s not at all scientific. But that’s only because we’re comparing it to the very rare instances in science where long-term perfect prediction is possible. Like the motions of planetary bodies or the behavior of a computer.

But in most cases, science struggles with perfect prediction. In medicine, it’s impossible to predict the exact course a disease will take in any one individual, even though it is often possible to predict what course it will take over a thousand individuals. In biology, it is impossible to predict, which features will be selected over others through natural selection. But it is possible to predict that some will be. But the best analogy, to my mind, is the weather.

Weather is the result of a large number (fractally infinite), perfectly knowable, describable and predictable physical events. But yet we cannot perfectly predict it even in hours or days and not at all in weeks or months. History (or rather any given present in the past or now or in the future) is also the result of a large (fractally infinite) number of relatively knowable, relatively describable and relatively predictable social events. Yet, we cannot predict it very well on any scale worth predicting.

The reason we don’t think of history as science but we think of meteorology as science even though both build models based on observation, known regularities and constants, is because the sort of reliable predictions a historian can make are of no use to anybody, while any kind of even moderately accurate weather prediction is extremely useful to everybody.

Here are some more things about the weather that can be used to view history. On most days, the weather is the same as the day before. You can predict the weather based on the current climate and what you know about the world for a few hours to days in advance (even if you still make errors). It is impossible to predict the exact weather (or history) months in advance but you can predict a range of possible weather patterns (e.g. summers in Europe can be warm or cold but there won’t be snow; political relations in the EU are warm or cold but there won’t be war).

You can also predict trends in changes in the climate but not the exact patterns or consequences or timings of those patterns (e.g. average global temperatures will rise but will it mean it will regularly snow in the summer in France?; disagreements between EU states will continue but will it mean a return to recurring warfare known up to the 1950s?). Most common mistakes in modelling the climate/weather and history come from confusing the local with the global (weather with climate and happenstance with trend) — e.g. during a cold summer, people may question global warming or the fall of the Roman empire was being predicted pretty much throughout its history until it happened hundreds of years later. Both weather and history can be disrupted by freak (Black Swan) events.

What this means is that history can be thought of as much more scientific than is commonly claimed without having to construct models that look like those of climatology.

History’s attractors

In semi-technical terms, weather is modeled using complexity theory. One of the properties of complex systems is sensitivity to initial conditions. Which means small changes in initial conditions can lead to large swings in the system’s state. This is often described as the ‘butterfly effect’ which is completely misleadingly described as ‘butterfly flapping its wings will cause a hurricane’. [See post on dangers of taking the analogy too far]

A much better example might be a weather front moving over a wooded area results in a tiny change of temperature that can then result in a hurricane developing if it was +0.5 degree Celsius or not developing if it was +1 degrees Celsius. Neither state ‘caused’ the hurricane — which was caused by the all the big forces that cause big things like hurricanes. But it was part of an initial configuration that structures the possibilities.

We have a certain set of contexts in which certain patterns tend to occur and others do not occur at all. With weather this could be climate (local or global) so it doesn’t snow in the tropics or rain in January in the Arctic. In history, people cannot use technologies not yet invented, or generally new agents do not appear out of the blue. [This is the obvious part.]
Rarely, freak events occur. You may get unseasonably warm weather in the Arctic, hurricane out of season, snow flurry in the tropics. In history, the Mongols, Conquistadors, ISIS came seemingly out of nowhere (and were not in any way predictable by models based on standard assumptions).
But outside of the freak events, you can predict the range of weather patterns in a given place during a given time period. There’s a range of weather patterns on Earth and weather stays within the limits set by those patterns. And you can do the same for history. Certain types of things are likely to happen (similar to things that have happened) and others are not — e.g. Alien invasions, raptures are unlikely to happen but invasions, civil wars, famines and epidemics are happening all the time.
It is possible to predict local weather patterns with a decent level of precision based on models in the extreme short term (hours to days) but even these predictions are subject to significant errors due to assumptions made in the models. E.g. it may matter whether a front went over a wooded area or a field. It is possible to accurately predict historical events in the extreme short term — hours to days — simply based on various models of causation (election results, scheduled events, advancing armies) but it is still subject to frequent errors due to assumptions in the models

Fractal histories

Above, I used the term ‘fractal infinity’. This is not (as far as I could find out) a technical term. It’s a metaphor based on the coastline paradox made famous by Madelbrot’s paper ‘How long is the coast of Britain’. This is the description from Wikipedia:

the length of the coastline depends on the method used to measure it. Since a landmass has features at all scales, from hundreds of kilometres in size to tiny fractions of a millimetre and below, there is no obvious size of the smallest feature that should be measured around, and hence no single well-defined perimeter to the landmass.

This means that potentially, there can be an infinite (or an indefinetely large) number of measuring units which is the paradox bit. But more interestingly these coastlines have patterns that are similar to each other across scales. This is how Madelbrot put it:

Geographical curves are so involved in their detail that their lengths are often infinite or, rather, undefinable. However, many are statistically “selfsimilar,” meaning that each portion can be considered a reduced-scale image of the whole.

Why is this relevant to history? I don’t want to overegg the analogy. Mandelbrot’s contribution was a mathematical description of these types of geometric objects and it worked well in certain quantifiable contexts. But that’s not what the study of social objects such as history needs. Those same quantifications won’t work on more analog problems. However, the analogy can explain a huge problem in historical analysis — namely conflation of similar patterns at vastly different levels of magnification.

Imagine history (ie. events as revealed to a human observer over time) as a landscape. As you fly over the landscape from a certain height, the different areas seem very similar or possibly identical (from a large enough distance, Earth will look like a dot). So, from a large enough distance all history will seem like striving for resources of groups of people. So it will make sense describing history as that.

When you zoom in a bit closer, you will see a great inequality in the struggle for resources so you may want to describe history in terms of ability to project power. And you may want to quantify those differences.

But if you zoom in even closer, you will see patterns that look very similar. Even though the groups are of different sizes, they all have very similarly hierarchical organization — with some sort of leadership on top which has to change over time. So, you will try to come up with rules for the formation of these hierarchies.

Yet, as you zoom in even more and you will notice completely different customs, ways of negotiation, ways of legitimizing. So you will postulate a complete incomensurability and simply describe the difference (kind of like a taxonomist biologist).

But then you zoom in even more at the level of individual motivations and you will see things like lust, hunger, aims, struggle for personal success, family — and then you can postulate that we are all the same.

But the problem is that it is actually relatively easy to describe the different levels of magnification in terms of each other because they are sort of like models of one another. An individual’s desires and dreams can be recast in terms of striving for resources; and the behaviors and customs at the level of a kingdom can be talked about in terms of individual desires.

So, the ‘dimensions’ of history depend on the length of the yardstick used to measure it. You can describe the same event from the ‘big man of history’ perspective, the ‘social forces’ perspective, ‘struggle for resources’ perspective or ‘long-duree’, inevitable forces of history perspective. Just like you can describe a chemical event at the level of the structure, molecular interactions or matter transformation.

But all of these levels/perspectives have their own rules and seemingly causal patterns. They also interact with each other but in complex ways that preclude simple reductionism. That is, we cannot say that interactions at one level of magnification cause interactions at another in the same way that an individual brick (or the laying of it) does not cause a wall to exist.

Aside: Wall metaphor of causality

I’ve come to like the ‘wall metaphor’ of causality. We have completely different intuitions about the causal chain of events resulting in the existence of a wall than we have about the chain of events that come to result in a historical event.

But perhaps rethinking historical events as walls can be helpful — as long as we also keep the differences in mind. We have the brick makers, brick layers, but also the commissioners, approvers, weather conditions, foundations, historical custom of brick making and brick laying — all of those play a role in the sort of wall we’re going to get.

And it is obvious that depending on our perspective the causal chains are going to be completely different. And the same goes for when we try to destroy the wall. We need commensurate forces — big enough force to make a dent, but we also need a lot of small events down to the molecular level. And different perspectives will identify different causal chains. All of them correct but obviously belonging to certain levels. These are obvious (or fairly obvious) when it comes to walls. But not so obvious when it comes to history.

Most good historians actually seem to have the same kind of intuitions about events as most of us do about walls. But they are often seduced by the customs of the genre of history writing into jettisoning their intuitions and coming up with a reductionist perspective instead.

What this means for the notion of causation in social science

We tend to think of causality in history as happening at the lowest level of magnification and accumulating into the total. And on a most straightforward account, this makes perfect sense. A lot of apples put into a basket + the basket, will make a basket full of apples. But that’s an unhelpful way of looking at causality because it implies a certain level of atomism — a final level of further indivisible measuring units. But that level cannot exist — or if it does exist it has to be so low (subatomic) that the whole cannot be modeled using it. Even if we believe in some sort of terminal particle, it is a fool’s errand (looking at you Stephen Hawking) to try to actually use it to measure object-level phenomena with it.

Which is why the butterfly causing a hurricane is such a poor way of thinking about sensitivity to initial conditions. No one aspect of the physical world ‘causes’ the weather — not the extra +.5 degrees Celsius of temperature, nor the gravitational pull of the moon or the Gulf stream. They constantly interact in a system at all levels. But our ability to model weather is supremely dependent on tiny deviations in measurement.

And the same holds for history and other social systems. No one event causes another event except in the most trivial sense. And an accumulation of little events does not ‘cause’ big events. Because there are no smallest events that could be said to constitute the final level of magnification for initial conditions. But our ability to perceive small events does have huge implications for our ability to model the future patterns of events.

It may have made a difference that Napoleon looked to the left instead of right during a battle thus winning it, which in turn led to his toppling of the Prussian state. Which in turn may have made a difference to the shape of the First World War or the Third Reich. But did that glance left actually cause any of those things or led to those things? Not outside the imaginations of writers of time travel scince fiction. It was just a small difference in the pattern (initial conditions) that made the system come out with a different state at a certain level of magnification.

But on another level, even if Napoleon had never been born, the system may have looked very much the same from a certain level of magnification (European states struggling for resources).

We can have models where big things cause other big things and little things cause other little things. And we must be careful to always know what level of magnification we’re talking about. But we must remember that we are talking about our models of what happens, not what actually happens in its totality. The bigger the models, the bigger errors in our measurement of initial conditions — or rather with the big models we actually have no hope of complete measurement of the initial conditions or any sort of computational tractability even if such measurement were possible.

So even very good and complete models of history have by definition no way of predicting anything with any level of accuracy into any kind of future. And we cannot use their accuracy on past events because our measurement of the data for the past is already filtered by what happened (ie history is written by the winners — or at least, the record keepers). We don’t have that kind of filter for the present or recent history.

We could use what we know from the past to help us sift through the data of the present but that’s where the initial conditions lie that can completely mess up our predictions. Even if we had a lawful model of individual psychology and small event dynamics — in the same way weather modelers have accurate models of molecular and Newtonian object physics — we still could not do a better job at prediction than the weather people can. And in fact, any individual success at prediction is no guarantee of the quality of the model over the long run.

What this means for Jared Diamond, Ian Morris, Niall Ferguson or CGP Grey

This essay was inspired by a recent podcast discussion of Jared Diamond’s now classic but highly controversial ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’. But I really started thinking about it when reading Ian Morris’ ‘Why the West Rules: For now’ and Niall Ferguson’s ‘Civilization’. They both suffered from the problem of unconscious magnification refocus.

Ferguson — who’s by far the sloppiest thinker of the three though by no means a worthless one — was the most illustrative example of this. He even could not fix on the idea of the West was for more than about half a chapter.

Morris, on the other hand, was the strictest in his assumptions and measurements — in effect creating two books — the argument and the footnotes. But even he seems to compress time periods and plays around with effect sizes and scales to make the whole thing work. The same thing Steven Pinker is doing in the infuriatingly flawed but worth reading ‘Better Angels of our Nature’.

I think of these as modern historiographical eschatology and it is important to read good anthropologists to fully understand what these people are reading out.

A perfect companion to all of these were David Graeber’s ‘Debt: First 5000 Years’ and most recently for me (although the earliest in publication date) Eric Wolf’s ‘Europe and the People without History’. Also worth reading are the most recent books on Atlantic history. But not of inconsiderable interest is even dross like Pat Buchanan’s ‘Decline of the West’ because it gives an example how many people are thinking about causes.

They all think of a theory of history as a collection of hypotheses about historical causality. But we already know what the causal chains are. Or, the good historians do. But then they forget about most of them when alighting on a good grand theory of history. Jumping from weather to climatology but then using the language of the climate to talk about the weather when they come to the lessons for us today or when they zoom in on the period of history they know really well.

CGP Grey when defending Diamond suggested that people keep criticizing Diamond for all the small things but they never substantively critique his grand narrative. That has also been my initial impression of many of the critiques.

But the criticism of Diamond is actually about him swooping from his heights of resource-utilization level of modeling history down to the level of individual events where he is much shakier and trying to use the same models on the small events. So this leads to a completely inaccurate description of what happened in the Americas — where the guns and steel mattered almost not at all and the germs relatively little (see here for more).

What mattered in the conquest of the 'new' world were the local politics — the conquistadors became enmeshed in local politics and their victories were results of alliances with other local factions. At the same time, the Portuguese had no chance of anything like that happening on the West coast of Africa or in India (even as they were winning some important naval victories against the Ottomans who had just as much steel, better guns and the same germs).

In some way, Diamond’s critics (who would not be caught dead at an NRA rally) are saying ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’. They are saying, real people killed and enslaved other real people — and we must judge what happened for what it happened. It wasn’t the guns, germs or steel that did it. It was our venerable ancestors that did it. And we’re still doing it — albeit in a less mindless genocidal way.

Diamond’s stated intention is to do away with the racial superiority explanation of the difference in the current power arrangements. And he explains a part of it. But he is not careful enough to explore the boundaries of his model. And when applied at the right level, his model does what it sets out to do. But when applied at other levels of magnification, it does exactly the opposite. It provides a way of justifying real bad human behavior as inevitable.

This is perhaps most starkly exemplified in his description of the Rwandan genocide in his other book ‘Collapse’. There he recasts it in terms of simple competition for resources. He may be right. But as recent Timothy Synder’s book on the holocaust argues, that same was true for the Nazi genocide (in the idea of lebensraum). But those were not causes. This involved people like us shooting other people like us. Up close and personal. And other people telling them to do it and benefiting from it in many ways.

Diamond’s models can explain some of the dynamics but they can only do it if they leave a lot of important information out — and the argument is that that’s the information that should matter to us here.

CGP Grey went on to ask, give me a better theory of history. This is a response to that challenge. History is like the weather. This is more a way of thinking about historiography than history itself. Kind of like the language turn in philosophy. We need to be careful with our models, just like we need to be careful with our language. As the saying goes, ‘all models are wrong, but some of them are useful’.

Stack fallacy, hierarchical structure in science and the meaning of history

As I was writing this, I came across this article on the Stack Fallacy which is making the same point in a different domain. You cannot just assume that because you’re good at building all the building blocks, you can build the whole structure. Brick makers are no good at building walls by virtue of being good brick makers and conversely brick layers are not going to be any good at brick making just because they can use bricks to build durable structures. (The post makes the point about databases and CRMs but its even starker at the physical level).

One of the commenters pointed to an old paper by P. W. Anderson ‘More is different’ that makes a similar point about physics [my emphasis].

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society.
The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexities. The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other.

A different way of restating this thesis is that the fundamental laws of the lower levels of organization apply at the higher levels (e.g. bricks have strengths and periods of decay and that will impact on how much a wall will withstand or how long it will stand up) but the higher levels have new emergent properties that cannot be easily described in terms of the lower levels. And vice versa, the lower levels cannot be described in terms of the higher levels of organization. However, the structures emergent at all levels can interact with structures emergent at other levels.

What does this mean for history? It can very well matter that a king was a violent drunk who lusted after his subjects’ daughters and wives, and therefore alienated all his followers leading to the collapse of a dynasty. However, when we look at the patterns of falls and rises of things like dynasties, we do not benefit from describing them in terms of individual psychology interacting with their immediate social norms.

That does not mean that the individual psychology and the social norms don’t matter to that individual king or individual dynasty. But falls and rises of dynasties just don’t rest on these issues there are broader patterns and dynamics — kings with highly praised kingly behavior cannot turn around the fall of a dynasty without resources and with external pressures and incompetent despised rulers do not tend to ruin powerful dynasties overnight.

To bring it back to the reimagined ‘butterfly effect’ metaphor. There are valid patterns that can be recognized but patterns are not causes. The exact shapes of the patterns or their varieties are extremely sensitive to initial conditions but the initial conditions are not the causes. Everything that comprises that pattern interacts together (that would include external inputs) to produce all its phases/shapes. It may even be inaccurate to call the pattern itself sensitive to initial conditions. It is our ability to make predictions about its future states and possibly judgments that is extremely sensitive to tiny errors in our observation of what we decide are the initial conditions for the purposes of our prediction making.

With certain weather patterns — like storms — the initial conditions are relatively easy to locate, if relatively difficult to measure. With historical events, it is a little more difficult. It is not always clear where we should look at the initial conditions. It is not uncommon for historians to say things like ‘but the real roots of this crisis lay much further in the past’ — Niall Ferguson’s ‘Civilisation’ is a case study in how badly this can get out of hand.

But historians also tend to freely jump between the levels. So in a recent LSE lecture, Ian Morris talked about long term (in the 1000s of years) trends in war and violence rates. He described an overall long-term equilibrium in violence necessary for the survival of a species. But then he started to talk about our individual natures from an evolutionary perspective, only to turn the talk into a discussion about the motivation of the elites to keep workers happy and alive to produce goods. And then he talked about the British Empire, Cold War, American supremacy and tried to draw conclusions from that.

That’s like saying one of these:

a) ‘there was a storm because it is summer when storms happen’ b) ‘this storm really began when the icebergs melted’ c) ‘there will be a storm on Tuesday, July 3rd, next year because we are experiencing global warming’

Intuitively, none of these statements make sense, even if they may be actually true. Of these, a) is uninformative, b) is also relatively uninformative because we could equally well go back to the formation of the Earth or the Big Bang but other than the arrow of time, we would have little in the way of modelling the causation, and c) is also a statement that is not useful even if it turns out that there actually is a storm on that day. Even if accurate, since our model is consistent with there being a storm on any day in July next year, it is not a useful prediction.

Yet, historians make statements like these all the time — on the surface, they are not this starkly nonsensical but if you peel away the narrative layers and just get down to simple causation, you get things that look like these. At the extreme, you get things like attributing the decline of the Roman empire to lead piping or the rise of the British empire to boiling tea. But even more complex interpretations of past events suffer from similar difficulties.

For instance, post invasion, dismissing all the Bahtist army officers is often cited as the roots of the current violence in the region. But we could plausibly imagine violence of different type but similar scale ‘resulting’ from not dismissing them. Similarly, when things go well in South Africa, everybody’s pointing to the peace and reconciliation for not creating any new resentments and drawing a line under the past. And when they go badly, people wonder if reconciliation was a problem because it did not give people justice or just stirred up trouble.

Ultimately, we cannot say much more than both are things that could happen. We simply have no way of tracking the causal chains at the level in which we could even run the models.

Critics of the social sciences argue that unlike the meteorologists who can build their larger weather models on solid physics, chemistry and geography, historians don’t actually have solid enough psychological models underlying their bigger sociological models. But that is to make the same error. Meteorological models can just about predict the weather tomorrow and the day after while sometimes making huge errors. Historical models are just as good. Equally, historical models can predict larger trends about as accurately as climatology. But we often treat them as if we thought it was possible to predict the weather a year from now.

So what is the point of history then? Its accurate predictions are not very useful and its useful predictions are not very accurate. Any statement like ‘people who forget their history are doomed to repeat it’ are nonsense. Knowing exactly what happened in the past is no better than knowing what the weather was 10 years ago. Other than knowing that anything that happened in the past can happen again, we’re no better off.

But the weather analogy can come to the rescue. On most days, for most people, it does not actually matter what the weather is going to be like tomorrow. Yet, people obsessively check their forecasts. It is interesting. And also it is something to talk about. And that is not nothing. Historical knowledge — you could argue — is even more valuable. It is something to talk about but unlike the weather (unless you think God sends it as reward or punishment), it can be used to help us make sense of today — not in a causal manner but in a narrative one. And the smart historians know that.

Why I am a feminist: A reading list

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I became a feminist because a woman once told me not to be an idiot and I decided that it was good advice. That was in 1998. But I was all ready to be a feminist long before that, so it really just took a small push to get me over the hump. I was always surrounded by strong women who outshone the men around them, read books as a boy with girls holding their own, later on had women friends who I could respect and like more than most of my male friends.

Yet, I was reticent to apply the label to myself. In those times, it was the women around me who were very sceptical of feminism. So, even when I had doubts about the essentialism of the male/female difference, I was willing to go along without examining the position in too much depth. But looking back, I don't think I was too happy about it.

So it took just a little jolt to show me a new way to reflect on things and I never looked back. Not being a feminist would now feel just as odd as not being a vegetarian.

But perhaps I did not always go about it the right way. In the early days, I felt like I had to go back to all my women friends and try to convince them that they really should be feminists, too. Later, I wrote articles supporting political correctness, reviews of Vagina Monologues and other books about gender. And the occasional blog post since. I tried my best.

I have not really felt the need to do any of that recently because it seems to me that the world of today has plenty of voices closer to the action and perhaps I don't have much to add. But then I started looking for a reading list for a friend and was surprised that few of my top choices made the top choices of others' lists.

The reading list of reading lists

There a plenty of 'feminist reading lists' on offer:

They list classics I know or know about like de Beauvoir, Steinem, Friedan, bell hooks, as well as new authors and books that passed me by. They list fiction, manifestos, polemics. Margaret Attwood makes a frequent appearance, some go as far back as Mary Wolstonecraft and the more complete include Judith Butler. There's plenty to read when one goes by the lists.

And I don't really object to any of the items on these lists. Particularly some of the older ones like de Beauvoir or Wolstonecraft are fascinating thinkers even today. But the six I came up with as recommendations appear on none of the lists I looked at. They don't even make the much more comprehensive Wikipedia List of feminist literature. Perhaps I have something to share, after all.

My list of 6 Books

These are the 6 books that I use to go to for feminist argumentation most often in my mind and the occasional writing. These books are not necessarily radically political but they are radically intellectual. Which, I think, is the main appeal of feminism to me. At its best, feminism is a radical unthinking of the commonplace. And what is more symptomatic of the commonplace than gender? Everything to do with the male/female distinction is steeped in an apparent natural inevitability. And feminism allows us to transcend that inevitability and gives us the inspiration to look for other inevitabilities to be made illusory in its wake.

I tried to find a related video for each book. Here's a whole companion playlist.

"Language and woman's place" by Robin Tolmach Lakoff (1972)

"Language uses us as much as we use language" - thus opens Robin Lakoff the world of possibilities with the first line of her book. It it was published in 1972 but it may be best to read it in its 30th anniversary edition with commentary and reflection. This is a foundational book for understanding the depth through which the gender power disparity is reflected in language.

Since then, there have been many books on gender and language from various perspectives - updating and expanding Lakoff's work. Deborah Tannen is one of the more prolific authors worth reading but 'Language and woman's place' is the place to start.

Here's a podcast where Lakoff talks about language and gender. Deborah Tannen has written lots of books and has lots of videos. Here's one I like about the differences between male and female speech patterns in friendship discourse.

"Why so slow" by Virginia Valian (1997)

This is a book that asks the question of what to do when the battle of the minds was won. In 2020, it seems like the battle is starting over again but in the late 1990s it appeared to have been all but over with just a few loose ends to be tied up.

Valian shows that it is the small steps that can add up to significant blockers of progress. The world in which women (at least in certain parts) find themselves today would have seemed far beyond the horizon of the possible as recently as the 1950s. But the chasm seems ever wider and deeper the closer we are to it. 'Why so slow' looks at some of the components of the gap and can help us find levers to perhaps finally close it. In many ways, many of Valian's suggestions have entered the common discourse but it is still worth going back to the source.

My biggest takeaway was that no overt sexism is even required for a society to end up with an imbalance between the sexes. Just small cumulative everyday injustices that may even pass beneath notice of most people involved in them.

Virginia Valian speaks on the topic in a lecture from 2009.

"Is multiculturalism bad for women?" by Susan Moller Okin and other contributors (1999)

Intersectionality is now on everybody's lips but the history of the fight for equality by various marginalised groups is one of constant tension. For example, women's movements were at different times both deeply intertwined with movement for racial justice and keeping it at arm's length.

This is a book of essays written in reaction to Okin's famous article that underscored the practical difficulty of women's rights when confronted with cultural rights. All contributors start from a concern for women's rights but some even turn the question on its head by asking questions like is feminism good for non-western women? Some question the underlying categories. But none offer easy answers.

When it comes to the utopias hidden behind the placards held by marchers needing to be translated into dirty realities, this is the book to turn to. The title of Martha Nussbaum's essay, "A Plea for Difficulty", should perhaps be a rallying cry for the aftermath of all revolutions just about to tuck in into their children.

I couldn't find any videos about this book but there are good discussions of the topic here and here even though they do not explicitly reference this debate. I mentioned Nussbaum and here's a great interview with her on gender and development.

"Marriage: A history" by Stephanie Coontz (2005)

This is not a book about feminism at all. It is a history of the Western side of the institution in which men and women most often used to encounter each other. It is a book that shows how what we know as 'marriage' is determined by the way we talk about it, the surrounding economic realities, and what came just before. Most importantly it shows the constant invention and reinvention of marriage and puts the lie to the 'traditional' notion of marriage invented by 1950s TV.

Stephanie Coontz talks about her earlier book 'The Way We Never Were' in a lecture here.

There's also a great interview with her on a New Books Network podcast. She also wrote a subsequent book about feminism and its reception in the 1960s and is interviewed about it here.

"Against Love: A Polemic" by Laura Kipnis (2003)

Kipnis is not against 'love' the feeling but against love as the organising principle of male-female relationships. Where Coontz shows the invention of love as an institutional category, Kipnis takes it apart in its various daily guises that people willingly enter into just to bind themselves to somebody else's nostalgia. Love, when conceived as a social institution, is worse for women than men. Exemplified by the traditional wedding photo of a woman turned subtly towards the male, while the man stares boldly forward. It is not love but the performance of love that can do more harm than good.

I couldn't find Kipnis talking about this book anywhere but here's an interview with her about a later collection of essays which shows her insight and subtlety of argument even in the face of a mediocre interviewer.

"The Gender of the Gift" by Marilyn Strathern (1988)

Not for the faint of heart, this is a dense book of anthropological insight. But it puts the question of women's role in society in a non-industrial perspective. This is both a feminist book but also a meta-feminist book thinking through the dualism that rejecting the dualistic can lead to. It also offers an answer to the question of multiculturalism being bad for women before it was ever asked - the answer being it's complicated.

I'm not sure if reading the first five books would make one ready to read Strathern - to get the wider point one has to read through a lot of technical anthropology. But what is feminism after all if not applied anthropology? Ultimately I think it's worth it - if perhaps a journey best embarked upon with a friend.

Strathern talks about an earlier book on gender and anthropology briefly here. Here's her later lecture on a different subject but showing the anthropological approach to similar issues.

All other books

All books, when read with gender and sex unthought, can be be part of a feminist reading list. They can be read for what they don't say, as well as what they do say. I wrote about some of my thinking on this here, here and here. And I seem to have written even more than I remember in Czech here: Feminismus a láska.pdf

And when all else fails, there's always Buffy the Vampire Slayer to turn to.

The nonsense of style: Academic writing should be scrupulous not stylish

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

The problem with writing advice

The problem with the likes of Steven Pinker and Helen Sword is that they like their own writing way too much. But I don't. Like their writing, that is. [1] I want to get some information from them and I want to get examples and counterexamples for the points they make. I want them to get to the point. I am not reading them for enjoyment, that's what fiction is for. I am reading them to learn what they have to say and I have to wade through a morass of stories, pointless metaphors, geysers of words. They are aiming for eloquence but effluence would be a better term for what their reader gets.

Of course, they get high praise and esteem from their peers, everybody wants to write like Pinker, Gladwell or Sword. And obviously many people buy and read their books. So they must be doing something right. But my claim is that they focus far too much of crafting their sentences and far too little time on crafting their advice.

And what's worse, they promote an environment where 'writing well' with style or panache is seen as a virtue. People are praised for that sort of writing and others are encouraged to emulate them. Sentences like "This was so well written, why can't more academics write like this" proliferate. But it misidentifies the problem. When academic writing is bad, it is not because of the opacity of prose but rather because of the paucity of scrupulous argumentation.

Defending academic writing

The complaint that academic writing is needlessly dense and abstruse has become a cliche and gets far too little examination. Nobody (except many frustrated readers) is officially complaining that non-fiction writing is needlessly flowery and sprawling across many more pages than necessary. It prides itself on taking the reader on a journey of discovery but it's actually all smoke and mirrors.

There is only one criterion that we should require of academic writing and that is the same requirement we should have of academic thinking. Scruples. Scrupulous writing will let the reader in on the uncertainty of knowledge, and messiness of the process of how knowledge is created. It will not try to write a press-release while presenting its argument. And it will not waste the reader's time by taking them on a journey. Starting every single point it wants to make with a story!

Starting with academic reading

Academic writing needs to start with the recognition of what academic reading looks like. The vast majority of academic writing is not read like fiction or popular non-fiction. It is read to get the piece of information one needs or to get a gist of what the overall point is. So, having a clear outline with descriptive titles would be much more important than removing unnecessary adverbs. Having an abstract that summarises the key points made in bullet points helps more than using active verbs. Using vocabulary appropriate to the needs of the audience is much more useful than trying to avoid jargon or acronyms.

The first advice you need to give to an academic writer is not to read a book on stylish writing but rather to read how people in their field are writing. Because those are their potential readers. And in their writing, we see what they are expecting. So anything written in the manner they expect will make reading easier for them. Because there is no academic writing as such, there is only writing within disciplines and communities. And barging into a community and trying to change what it's doing without invitation is not stylish, it is rude. [2]

Why are people reading and why are people writing? They are reading to discover the argument that the author is putting forward. And they are writing to put debate the arguments of others and to put forth more of their own. Their success in doing so should be our primary criterion. The success of academic writing is not some abstract readability score but the ability of the peers to identify and debate the argument it puts forward. [3]

Practical advice on composition: Shorter sentences

This is where we can give some practical advice. And the advice can be summarised in 3 words: 1. Write 2. shorter 3. sentences. Ignore everything about passives, jargon, conversational writing, whatever else the latest guide puts forward. Focus on keeping your average sentence to about 15 words. Not every sentence has to be that short but if you keep the average somewhere between 15 and 20 words, your writing will be easier to read.

Keeping sentences short is not only good for the reader, it is also good for the writer. Often a long sentence means muddled thought. If I find a sentence I wrote that's longer than say 30 words, I often also find that the thought behind it is not clear enough. I had an idea in my mind that had too many assumptions and I had not put enough work into parsing out all the connections.

But not always, sometimes a longer sentence is better for both the writer and the reader. Text that is easy to understand is cohesive as well as coherent and too many short clauses will lack cohesion. The reader needs to know which things link together and making that explicit will make the text better.

The good news is that sentence length is easy to check without having to learn opaque grammatical concepts. We know that people most exercised about passives are least likely to actually spot them in the sentence. So why should we expect normal writers to pay attention to parts of speech or fine details of sentence structure. But anybody can paste their text into the free Hemingway Writer and see if they can shorten the sentences highlighted in red.[4] Doing it regularly will also give you a chance to focus on how sentences are put together.

Structure is king: Rich outlines

If you really care about your readers, make sure you make the outline of your writing explicit. Don't just mark the normal sections like: Introduction or Conclusions. That is helpful for navigation but not understanding. Put headings inside these sections and have them every few paragraphs to summarise what you're trying to say in those paragraphs. This will aid readers who are not reading your text in sequence to get the gist and also not to miss important points.

You may complain about the youths today not spending enough time on deep reading, but paradoxically, if the structure is marked clearly enough, people are likely to read more of the actual text, as well, because it breaks the work into smaller chunks. Particularly students or novices are often horrified by the walls and walls of undifferentiated texts they are asked to climb. Dividing it into smaller, labelled chunks makes the text more approachable and more likely to be read.

This rich outlining can be done while planning your writing, during writing or during revision. I often don't start with an outline because I'm not yet clear on exactly what I want to say. But I always create an outline at some point. It helps me discover all the missing and inconsistent bits that are so easy to miss in an extended narrative.

And, finally, if you have an outline, share it with the reader. Put it at the top of the text. It could be a table of contents or just a list of bullets. Better still, put it in the abstract. It is infuriating, reading an abstract that says what the paper tries to show and not what it actually showed. [4]

All you need

And that's it, clear explicit structure and moderately shorter sentences. No stories, no metaphors, no flourishes. No avoidance of passives or reduction of adverbs. No worries about technical language. Just these two. They will not only make the academic writing easier to read, they will also make it more scrupulous.

Self-criticism

Do I write as I say? Not always and not always perfectly. Some of my sentences do get long and my composition tends to the flowery. For example, the sentence about the importance of shorter sentences is the longest one of this post at 43 words. I thought about breaking it up but I liked its rhythm, so I left it. But my average sentence is 14 words and this makes the overall readability higher.

But that is the lot of anyone who writes about writing. The more strident your strictures, the more likely you are to fall afoul of them.

Notes

[1] For those who do not routinely read books on writing. The title of the post refers to a book by Steven Pinker "The Sense of Style" which is a lot to wade through for not very much useful advice. The other book I complain about is Helen Sword's "Stylish Academic Writing", which overall has better and more actionable advice than Pinker. But the problem with Sword is that many of the examples she sets out to change actually don't need changing that much. And the examples she singles out for praise are questionable.

[2] The advice about how important it is pay attention about the language of the community you're writing for is best summarised by Larry McEnerney in his talk about Writing beyond the academy.

[3] The importance of thinking about your writing as communicating with interested peers is often made by Thomas Basbøll) on his blog Inframethodology. But it is also the core of the argument of this paper by Cathy Birkenstein defending Judith Butler against the charge of incomprehensibility.

[4] The Hemingway App also tries to identify passives and adverbs. Feel free to entirely ignore its advice. Also, it computes a readability score which is useful. But all it does is count letters in words and words in sentences. It is easy to game just by randomly inserting periods through out the text. ****

Metaphors and freedom: On Tolkien's notion of allegory vs applicability

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

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Sun, 28 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

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Sun, 16 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

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Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

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Tue, 21 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

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Sun, 08 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT

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Tue, 23 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

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Fruit loops and metaphors: Metaphors are not about explaining the abstract through concrete but about the dynamic process of negotiated sensemaking

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

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Sun, 30 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

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Writing as translation and translation as commitment: Why is (academic) writing so hard?

Sat, 15 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

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5 kinds of understanding and metaphors: Missing pieces in pedagogical taxonomies

Fri, 14 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

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Wed, 29 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

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Sun, 28 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

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Wed, 07 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

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Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

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Tue, 22 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

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Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

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Therapy for Frege: A brief outline of the theory of everything

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Mon, 19 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

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What language looks like: Dictionary and grammar are to language what standing on one foot is to running

Wed, 05 Nov 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Background Sometimes a rather obscure and complex analogy just clicks into place in one's mind and allows a slightly altered way of thinking that just makes so much sense it hurts. Like putting glasses on in the morning and the world suddenly snapping into shape. This happened to me this morning when reading the Notes…

Anthropologists' metaphorical shenanigans: Or how (not) to research metaphor

Sun, 03 Aug 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Over on the excellent 'Genealogy of Religion' , Cris Campbell waved a friendly red rag in front of my eyes to make me incensed over exaggerated claims (some) anthropologists make about metaphors. I had expressed some doubts in previous comments but felt that perhaps this particular one deserves its own post. The book Cris refers…

What does it mean when words 'really' mean something: Dismiss the Miss

Sat, 17 May 2014 00:00:00 GMT

A few days ago, I tweeted a link to an article in TES : What Miss really means < It's always worthwhile re-examining ingrained inequalities http://t.co/GKhjc4VgUP #edchat #ukedchat #feminism — Dominik Lukes (@techczech) May 17, 2014 Today, I got the following response back: @techczech 'really means' talks about origins. It doesn't mean that to me…

What is not a metaphor: Modelling the world through language, thought, science, or action

Tue, 04 Mar 2014 00:00:00 GMT

The role of metaphor in science debate (Background) Recently, the LSE podcast an interesting panel on the subject of "Metaphors and Science" . It featured three speakers talking about the interface between metaphor and various 'scientific' disciplines (economics, physics and surgery). Unlike many such occasions, all speakers were actually very knowledgeable and thoughtful on the…

Linguistics according to Fillmore

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 00:00:00 GMT

While people keep banging on about Chomsky as being the be all and end all of linguistics (I'm looking at you philosophers of language), there have been many linguists who have had a much more substantial impact on how we actually think about language in a way that matters. In my post on why Chomsky…

5 things everybody should know about language: Outline of linguistics' contribution to the liberal arts curriculum

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Drafty This was written in some haste and needs further refinement. Maybe one day that will come. For now, it will be left as it stands. Background This post outlines what I think are the key learnings from the output of the research of the field of linguistics that should be reflected in the general…

Binders full of women with mighty pens: What is metonymy

Sat, 14 Dec 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Metonymy in the wild Things were not going well for Mitt Romney in early autumn of last year. And then he responded to a query about gender equality with this sentence: "I had the chance to pull together a cabinet, and all the applicants seemed to be men… I went to a number of women's…

Three books of the year 2013 and some books of the century 1900-2013

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I have been asked (as every year) to nominate three books of the year for Lidové Noviny (a Czech paper I contribute to occasionally). This is always a tough choice for me and some years I don't even bother responding. This is because I don't tend to read books 'of the moment' and range widely…

Pervasiveness of Obliging Metaphors in Thought and Deed

Sun, 27 Oct 2013 00:00:00 GMT

" when history is at its most obliging, the history-writer needs be at his most wary." ( China by John Keay ) I came across this nugget of wisdom when I was re-reading the Introduction to John Keay's history of China. And it struck me that in some way this quote could be a part…

Storms in all Teacups: The Power and Inequality in the Battle for Science Universality

Fri, 20 Sep 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The great blog Genealogy of Religion posted this video with a somewhat approving commentary: The video started off with panache and promised some entertainment, however, I found myself increasingly annoyed as the video continued. The problem is that this is an exchange of cliches that pretends to be a fight of truth against ignorance. Sure…

Sunsets, horizons and the language/mind/culture distinction

Sat, 24 Aug 2013 00:00:00 GMT

For some reason, many accomplished people, when they are done accomplishing what they've set out to accomplish, turn their minds to questions like: What is primary, thought or language. What is primary, culture or language. What is primary, thought or culture. I'd like to offer a small metaphor hack for solving or rather dissolving these…

How we use metaphors

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I was reminded by this blog post on LousyLinguist that many people still see metaphor as an unproblematic homogeneous concept leading to much circular thinking about them. I wrote about that quite a few years ago in: Lukeš, D., 2005. Towards a classification of metaphor use in text: Issues in conceptual discourse analysis of a…

Do we need a gaming literacy: Literacy metaphor hack

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I am a gaming semi-literate! I was listening to the discussion of the latest BioShock game on the latest TWiT podcast when I realized that I am in fact game illiterate. I am hearing these stories and descriptions of experiences but I know I can't access them directly without a major investment in knowledge and…

Framing and constructions as a bridge between cognition and culture: Two Abstracts for Cognitive Futures

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I just found out that both abstracts I submitted to the Cognitive Futures of the Humanities Conference were accepted. I was really only expecting one to get through but I'm looking forward to talking about the ideas in both. The first first talk has foundations in a paper I wrote almost 5 years ago now…

The complexities of simple: What simple language proponents should know about linguistics [updated]

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Update Part of this post was incorporated into an article I wrote with Brian Kelly and Alistair McNaught that appeared in the December issue of Ariadne . As part of that work and feedback from Alistair and Brian, I expanded the final section from a simple list of bullets into a more detailed research programme…

Cliches, information and metaphors: Overcoming prejudice with metahor hacking and getting it back again

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240"] Professor Abhijit Banerjee (Photo credit: kalyan3)[/caption] "We have to use cliches," said professor Abhijit Banerjee at the start of his LSE lecture on Poor Economics . "The world is just too complicated." He continued. "Which is why it is all the more important, we choose the right cliches." [I'm paraphrasing here.]…

Pseudo-education as a weapon: Beyond the ridiculous in linguistic prescriptivism

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Teacher in primary school in northern Laos (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption] Most of us are all too happy to repeat clichés about education to motivate ourselves and others to engage in this liminal ritual of mass socialization. One such phrase is "knowledge is power". It is used to refer not just to…

Character Assasination through Metaphoric Pomposity: When one metaphor is not enough

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

George Lakoff is known for saying that "metaphors can kill" and he's not wrong. But in that, metaphors are no different from any other language. The simple amoral imperative "Kill!" will do the job just as nicely. Nor are metaphors any better or worse at obfuscating than any other type of language. But they are…

Who-knows-what-how stories: The scientific and religious knowledge paradox

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I never meant to listen to this LSE debate on modern atheism because I'm bored of all the endless moralistic twaddle on both sides but it came on on my MP3 player and before I knew it, I was interested enough not to skip it. Not that it provided any Earth-shattering new insights but on…

RaAM 9 Abstract: Of Doves and Cocks: Collective Negotiation of a Metaphoric Seduction

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Given how long I've been studying metaphor (at least since 1991 when I first encountered Lakoff and Johnson's work and full on since 2000) it is amazing that I have yet to attend a RaAM (Researching and Applying Metaphor) conference. I had an abstract accepted to one of the previous RaAMs but couldn't go. This…

21st Century Educational Voodoo

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Jim Shimabukuro uses Rupert Murdoch's quote “We have a 21st century economy with a 19th century education system” to pose a question of what should 21st Century Education look like ( http://etcjournal.com/2008/11/03/174/ ) "what are the key elements for an effective 21st century model for schools and colleges?". However, what he is essentially asking us…

Moral Compass Metaphor Points to Surprising Places

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I thought the moral compass metaphor has mostly left current political discourse but it just cropped up - this time pointing from left to right - as David Plouffe accused Mitt Romney of not having one . As I keep repeating, George Lakoff once said “Metaphors can kill.” And Moral Compass has certainly done its…

There's more to memory than the brain: Psychologists run clever experiments, make trivial claims, take gullible internet by storm

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The online media are drawn to any "scientific" claims about the internet's influence on our nature as humans like flies to a pile of excrement. Sadly, in this metaphor, only the flies are figurative. The latest heap of manure to instigate an annoying buzzing cloud of commentary from Wired to the BBC, is an article…

The death of a memory: Missing metaphors of remembering and forgetting?

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I have forgotten a lot of things in my life. Names, faces, numbers, words, facts, events, quotes. Just like for anyone, forgetting is as much a part of my life as remembering. Memories short and long come and go. But only twice in my life have I seen a good memory die under suspicious circumstances…

Killer App is a bad metaphor for historical trends, good for pseudoteaching

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Niall Ferguson wrote in The Guardian some time ago about how awful history education has become with these "new-fangled" 40-year-old methods like focusing on "history skills" that leads to kids leaving school knowing "unconnected fragments of Western history: Henry VIII and Hitler, with a small dose of Martin Luther King, Jr." but not who was…

Language learning in literature as a source domain for generative metaphors about anything

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

In my thinking about things human, I often like to draw on the domain of second language learning as the source of analogies. The problem is that relatively few people in the English speaking world have experience with language learning to such an extent that they can actually map things onto it. In fact, in…

You don't have to be a xenophobe to think Britain being an island matters, but it helps!

Sat, 21 May 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I have a distinct feeling of writing about this somewhere but can't find it, so here's the rant redux. The images on which our thinking and reasoning are based can sometimes exert a powerful force. There are many mechanisms we use to counter that force but sometimes it is very difficult. It seems particularly difficult…

The natural logistics of life: The Internet really changes almost nothing

Sat, 07 May 2011 00:00:00 GMT

This is a post that has been germinating for a long time. But it was most immediately inspired by Marshall Poe's article claiming that " The Internet Changes Nothing ". And as it turns out, I mostly agree. OK, this may sound a bit paradoxical. Twelve years ago, when I submitted my first column to…

When is subtle manipulation of data a flat out lie? Truth about Chinese prisons [UPDATE]

Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I've been on a China kick lately ( reading and listening about its history and global position) and a crime public policy kick ( reading and listening to Mark Kleiman). I was struck when I heard Mark say in an interview that the US has more people in jail in absolute terms than China. So…

I object: A male feminist's view on the Duchess of Cambridge's Wedding dress

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Maybe I should be watching more TV but I honestly had no idea what Kate Middleton looked like. There must have been times I would have heard references to her and thought she was some kind of actress or model. And frankly, I still don't care. But I do care about her dress. I am…

Poetry without metaphor? Sure but can it darn your socks?

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Over on the Language Log , Victor Mair puts to rest that all English expressions have to be tensed and thus prevent timeless poetry. He shares his translation of a 13th century Chinese poet thus: Autumn Thoughts by Ma Zhiyuan Withered wisteria, old tree, darkling crows – Little bridge over flowing water by someone's house…

Religion, if it exists, is negotiation of underdetermined metaphoric cognition [UPDATED]

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Preamble I am an old atheist and a new agnostic. I don't believe in God in the old-fashioned Russellian way - if I don't believe in Krishna, Zeus, water sprites or the little teapot orbiting the Sun, I don't believe in God and the associated supernatual phenomena (monotheism my foot!). However, I am agnostic about…

Life expectancy and the length and value of life: On a historical overimagination

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

About 10 years ago, I was looking through a book on populations changes in the Czech lands. It consisted of pretty much just tables of data with little commentary. But I was shocked when I came across the life expectancy charts. But not shocked at how short people's lives had been but how long. The…

Why don't metaphorical hawks kill metaphorical doves?

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

A very common metaphor in the political discourse on war is that of doves (peaceniks) and hawks (war-mongers). It has been around at least since the cold war. But it stops at "doves=peaceful" and "hawks=aggressive". It completely ignores other properties of the animals, e.g. the fact that "hawks hunt and kill doves". I did a…

Are we the masters of our morality? Yes!

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

We spend a lot of time worrying about the content to which we expose the young generation both individually and collectively. However, I am exceedingly coming to the conclusion that it makes absolutely no difference (at least as far as morality and lawfulness is concerned). Well sure, we know things like that children of Christians…

Comedian identifies a critical flaw in structuralism: Are distinctive features like leather sleeves

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I always thought this little bit by Demetri Martin highlights a crucial deficiency in any distinctive feature analysis. Demetri Martin: "I was at a party, and I saw a guy with a leather jacket, and I thought, 'That's cool'. Then I saw a guy with a leather vest and I thought, 'That's not cool'. It…

Epistemology as ethics: Decisions and judgments not methods and solutions for evidence-based practice

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Show me the money! Or so the saying goes. Implying that talk is cheap and facts are the only thing that matters. But there is another thing we are being asked to do with money and that is put it where our mouth is. So evidence is not quite enough. We have to also be…

Do science fiction writers dream of fascist dictatorships?

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Some years ago in a book review , I made an off-the-cuff comment that thriller writers tend to be quite right-wing in their outlook whereas science fiction authors are much more progressive and leftist. This is obviously an undue generalisation (as most of such comments tend to be) but it felt intuitively right. Even then…

The brain is a bad metaphor for language

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Note: This was intended to be a brief note. Instead it developed into a monster post that took me two weeks of stolen moments to write. It's very light on non-blog references but they exist. Nevertheless, it is still easy to find a number of oversimplifications, conflations, and other imperfections below. The general thrust of…

Literally: Triumph of pet peeve over matter

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I have a number of pet peeves about how people use language. I am genuinely annoyed by the use of apostrophes before plural of numerals or acronyms like 50's or ABC's. But because I understand how language works, I keep my mouth shut. The usage has obviously moved on. I don't think, ABC's is wrong…

The most ridiculous metaphor of education courtesy of an economics professor

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Acclaimed academics have policy agendas just like anybody else. And often they let them interfere with a straightforward critical analysis of their output. The monumental capacity for blindness of highly intelligent people is sometimes staggering. Metaphors and analogies (same thing for metaphor hacking) make thinkers particularly prone to mis-projection blindness . Edward Glaeser , a…

Philosophers’ songbook #philbitescomp

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I was so inspired by the #philbitescomp twitter contest that I wrote a short history of philosophy in tweetable fragments of songs. Parmenides’ lament: I guess it will make a change when things stop changing Heracleitus’ blues: I cried you the same river thrice Plato’s polka: two steps out of the cave and look at…

Metaphor is my co-pilot: How the literal and metaphorical rely on the same type of knowledge

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

"Thanks" to experimental philosophy, we have a bit more evidence confirming, that what many people think about the special epistemological status of metaphor is bunk. We should also note that Gibbs' and Glucksberg's teams have been doing a lot of similar research with the same results since the late 1980s. This is how Joshua Knobe…

The Tortoise and the Hare: Analogy for Academia in the Digital World?

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Dan Cohen has decided to "crowdsource" (a fascinating blend, by the way) the title of his next book with the following instructions. The title should be a couplet like “The X and the Y” where X can be “Highbrow Humanities” “Elite Academia” “The Ivory Tower” “Deep/High Thought” [insert your idea] and Y can be “Lowbrow…

Why Chomsky doesn't count as a gifted linguist

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Somebody commented on the Language Log saying "of course [...] Chomsky was a massively gifted linguist" http://j.mp/9Q98Bx and for some reason, to use a Czech idiom, the handle of the jar repeatedly used to fetch water just fell off. Meaning, I've had enough. I think we should stop thinking of Chomsky as a gifted linguist…

Why ideas aren't enough to solve the Palestine-Israeli conflict

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

An advertising agency is trying to solve a bloody conflict . This is presumptuous on such as scale that it could be called idiotic. Quoth http://www.theimpossiblebrief.com : "Rather than 'out of date' policies, we need 'out of the box' solutions. Let's show the world that creative minds at their best can inspire even political leaders."…

I write like… a new more sophisticated stripper name?

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Making connections between ourselves and other people no matter how arbitrary, is an incredibly popular communal as well as private activity. The many algorithms for generating one's stripper, mobster or some other kind of name have graduated from napkins in bars to Facebook apps and now proper quantitative analysis of text samples. But deep down…

What it's not about so much about

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="740" caption="XKCD on Tropes"] [/caption] via http://volokh.com/2010/07/06/analogies-metaphors-and-similes

Hacking a metaphor in five steps

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Preliminaries 1. Before you start metaphor hacking you must first accept that you don't have a choice but to speak in some sort of a figurative fashion. Almost nothing worth saying is entirely literal and there are many things whose "literalness" is rooted in metaphor. Look at "I sat in a chair the whole day."…

What it’s all About

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Metaphors are not just something extra we use when we're feeling poetic or at a loss for le mot juste, they are all over our minds, texts and conversations. Just like conjunctions, tenses or word. And just like anything else, they can be used for good or ill, on purpose or without conscious regard. Their…

Metaphor Hacker

Schemas and Propositions: What and where I've been writing and what's next

What's been happening?

My writing exiles

Semi-official semi-retirement and migration

Schemas and Propositions

Narrative vs Ruminative Sense making: The Mind Red in Tooth and Claw

TL;DR

Hunting for sense and cardboard gazelles: The limits of a narrative

Getting the sense back in a field of grass: The potential of the ruminative node

Mind red in tooth and claw: Bringing narratives and ruminatives together into a single ecosystem

Improving academic writing: Four books to read during #AcWriMo

What is #AcWriMo

Build your BASE with "Air & Light & Time & Space" by Helen Sword

Listen and watch

Key quotes illustrating BASE

Learn "How to write a sentence" from Stanley Fish

Listen and watch

Key quotes

Start your "Writing process reengineering" with Thomas Basbøll

Watch

Key quotes

Work out with one of "50 Exercises for Paced, Productive, and Powerful Writing" by Patricia Goodson

Watch

Key quotes

Try one of "50 Ways to Excel at Writing" by Stella Cottrell

Some more thoughts

Unintentional Pygmalions: 4 questions to ask when checking an artificial entity for sentience and how to think about the answers

Summary

Background

The four questions

1. Epistemology: What story are we trying to tell?

2. Checking for time-persistent identity

3. Autonomous Intentionality

4. Embodiment and theory of mind

Can an alien intelligence be sentient without embodiment, intentionality, or conversational facility?

Embodiment

Theory of mind

Conversational implicature

Paradoxes of Autonomous Intentionality (on conspiracy foundations of the mind sciences)

Some acknowledgements of intellectual debts

Learning is a Journey: Consequences of a metaphor

How to read this

Journey metaphor breakdown (12 mins)

Note on method

Map

What is relevant about maps

How it applies to teaching/learning

Where the metaphor breaks down

Itinerary

What is relevant about itineraries

How it applies to teaching and learning

Where the metaphor breaks down

Briefing

What is relevant about a briefing

How it applies to teaching and learning

Where the metaphor breaks down

Guide

What is relevant about a guide

How it applies to teaching and learning

Where the metaphor breaks down

Comparison chart

Overall lessons (5 mins)

Lack of itineraries

How can itineraries help

Time

Aside: Two modes of teaching

Preparation and the journey

Note on the benefits of metaphor

3 fundamental problems of translating metaphor (or anything else)

How hard is it to translate metaphor?

What is and is not a metaphor?

Problem 1. Idiomaticity and conventionality

Problem 2. Knowledge and underdetermination

Problem 3. Cohesion and coherence

All the other problems of translation

Background

Summary of main points

More readings on metaphor

How metaphor works