The Epistemic IKEA Effect

The Epistemic IKEA Effect posits that people derive more value of out ideas or worldviews that they've assembled themselves. This is riffing on the idea of the IKEA Effect more generally, which states that people attach more (intrinsic) value to something that they have made themselves.

This paper, the IKEA effect and the production of epistemic goods is a really interesting read (I'll admit to skimming a bunch of it when it gets into the weeds with more formal logic arguments). To paraphrase:

• People ascribe more (intrinsic) value to things they have made themselves; IKEA furniture is a common example of this.
• This is perfectly rational -- the piece of furniture is more meaningful to those people because of the effort they have invested in constructing it!
• It's only irrational when people mistake that intrinsic value that it has for them as a form of extrinsic value that will necessarily be meaningful for others. Or, notably, where they think the intrisic value that exists for them makes it equal to or better to the extrinsic value imparted by the work of a master artisan, when anyone else is going to judge them largely on that extrinsic value (as exhibited through, say, the beauty and craft of the piece).
• The paper relates this to an epistemic context. People ascribe more value to ideas/beliefs/thoughts that they have 'assembled' themselves.
• Which would include investing your time in reading about something, 'doing your own research' (cough), or even conspiracy theories.
• As with the original version of the effect, this isn't necessarily irrational or fallacious. It does have meaning and additional value for those people.
• But it becomes significant -- and irrational -- when people regard that intrisic value coming from their own investment of intellectual work as being the equal or better of extrinsic value from, say, someone who is an expert in vaccines talking about vaccines.
• I'm not going to pretend that it's always going to be that straightforward and that all experts are clearly delineated and always agree -- nor does the perspective of domain experts always solely matter at the expense of all else. But, let's be honest, in most practical situations, the word of an expert matters far more than someone who has done their own research.
• But, still, the point where this becomes irrational or becomes a kind of cognitive bias is where people conflate intrinsic and extrinsic value and treat them as if they're equally weighted and relevant outside of their own heads.

The paper had two interesting suggestions for engaging with epistemic issues like this. It referred to an existing phenomenon I found interesting, called the illusion of explanatory depth -- which basically amounts to asking people to explain something in detail and so forcing them to grapple with the limits of their own understanding of the thing in question. But it also introduces the idea of inviting people to do their own intellectual work when trying to, say, debunk a conspiracy theorist, because of the Epistemic IKEA Effect meaning they will ascribe more value to something in which they have invested their own intellectual labour. (Not that that's a straightforward or simple a thing, but still: interesting).

This Twitter thread, where I came across this originally, had some further interesting insights: https://twitter.com/neuro_skeptic/status/1548338935574589446.

Imaginations of Politics and Governance

Some convergence in recent reading has me thinking about politics and governance. Apt in the UK now (though whenever is it not?), although we feel very far away from anything even functional, let alone actually good that serves people at large.

Bit of a scrapbook post, this one, mostly collating interesting quotes.

# 3 Design Principles for Protopian Governance is a good read. Particularly:

Governance is the capacity of humans to weave their individual streams-of-action into coordinated wholes, so that actions form chains that are coordinated across time and space, in a manner increasing the likelihood of desirable results and decreasing the likelihood of undesirable results.

...

Governance includes the coordination of human communicative actions that determine which results are desirable and undesirable.

My friend, the philosopher Magnus Vinding, suggests in his new book, Reasoned Politics, that “politics” has two layers: a values layer (establishing what we want and why) and an empirical layer (establishing what is true about getting where we want, so as to inform policy and action). I think that works well: governance, in a comprehensive sense, is about coordinated actions, including establishing the values from which we govern and agree to be governed.

I also keep finding myself referring back to Hannah Nicklin's definition of politics (from Writing for Games):

This is a commonly used way to distinguish between ‘big P’ political systems (voting, writing to your representative in government, attending a rally) and ‘small p’ politics (the interplay of power and actions between people and communities).

(emphasis mine)

I think both of these throw into focus (for me, at least) how wonky and useless our definition of 'politics' tends to be. It tends to collapse primarily into the big-P version. Another definition I read somewhere once:

Politics is what we do to try to keep from killing one another.

This is one of the reasons it sounds so ridiculous when people accuse others of 'making something political' or 'bringing politics into games'. It just fundamentally misunderstands... well, a lot of things. But largely what politics is and is for and why it's not something undesirable.

The '3 Design Principles' post also touches on sortition, which James Bridle talks about in Ways of Being. That's the sort of thing that, in principle, gives me stronger hopes for the future. But I don't see a clear path of how we get from here to there. Another quote, this one from Bridle:

Any technological question at sufficient scale becomes one of politics.

And two other bites for you:

New Deep Narratives: we need new stories of what it means to be human

Why we need a public internet and how to get one

If this post has a point, and I'm not sure that it does: it's to keep thinking about and imagining alternatives to where we are, and to remember that our reality is not inevitable.

Ways of Being

I finally finished James Bridle's Ways of Being last night. As with his last book, New Dark Age, this is one of the most striking and important books I've read in recent years. It's a fascinating and captivating survey of what it is to be us, and of the particular juncture at which we find ourselves in terms of our relationship to technology, our planet's other inhabitants, and each other. Our misguided, anthropocentric attempts to define intelligence (in our own terms), our poor stewardship of the world and separation of ourselves from animals, our complex relationship with machine which we see as an inevitable monolith -- but is in fact the result of singular, comprehensible choices.

As with New Dark Age, I find something slightly uncanny about reading Ways of Being, inasmuch as it so squarely aligns with a set of interlocking topics which have fascinated me for years. It's both validating and unnerving to see someone else (someone much better equipped to explore and articulate them) working through my same set of preoccupations.

The book has filled me with a lot of thoughts and emotions. A combination of hope and more articulate despair, with both a sharper awareness of how far we are from where I feel we need to be, but also with a clear sense of vision of what that could look like that makes it feel more than theoretical, even if still remote. I've still got some chewing and recapping to do, but it's also snapped into focus some important themes and elements in a couple of pieces of my own work that have been kicking around in loose development for a few years. I look forward to disentangling what I've come away with.

Ways of Being, James Bridle, Penguin Books 2022

Sacral Catenaries

I've talked before about the umwelt of birds and what that means to me. A couple of threads came together for me last week in my brain:

• The feeling of coming 'close' to an animal like that has a kind of sacral quality to me.
• Not 'close' necessarily in the sense of physical proximity, but the sense of briefly brushing close to something other, intellectually and emotionally.
• This isn't -- almost never can be -- more than momentary, transitory. (The kind of connection that wasn't both of those things would feel different anyway.)
• But there's a sense of brushing close to something -- two catenary lines that trend together, briefly, before diverging.
• The briefness, unlikelihood of that encounter is something that empowers it.
• In what will briefly feel like a complete topic shift: I've been playing Wildermyth recently (it's very, very good). And one of the things that struck me about the writing (which is also very, very good) is how well it does old gods and magic -- the feeling of encountering something unknowable and fundamental.
• Writing that sort of thing well is hard. Pull back too much and keep things too vague, and it's very mysterious, but distant and unsatisfying. Dive in too deep, and you've got something that feels close and knowable and not sacral.
• The feeling that Wildermyth creates for me in those moments, like finding a vast stone idol with a crystal heart beneath the mountain, is this feeling of two catenary curves brushing past one another.
• There's enough detail and specificity and feeling that you are seeing something and being seen by it, but without full mutual comprehension.
• There's the sense that this is a meaningful enough encounter that it can change one or both of them.
• But it doesn't seek to explain everything or peel back the veil so far that things become mundane.
• Back to animals: we often, understandably, anthropomorphise them and their behaviour. But that in a way reduces it and distances us from the reality of what's going on -- the complex self and umwelt of the animal when we (try to) discard our human lens.
• But there are those rare moments where you can feel like you're in communion with another being as itself and not solely as a function of projecting human qualities onto it. It's fleeting and fragile but it has that feeling of two objects brushing past one another in deep space, before hurtling off unstoppably.

Resonant Frequencies

Another strand of my thought about Umwelt, specifically in the context of visualising the 'experience' of a self-driving car. I was thinking about Alvin Lucier's 'I Am Sitting in a Room'. This is an experimental audio work that features Lucier, as you might guess, sitting in a room. He reads from a script into a recorder ('I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now...'), then plays back that recording into the recorder, then plays back that recording into the... etc. You can listen to the piece on YouTube here.

You can look at the effect from a physical or experiential point of view. Physically, each new cycle amplifies specific things about the recording -- in particular, the resonant frequencies of the room, though presumably also other elements like imperfections in the recording medium. The experiential side is the slow dissolution of signal into noise -- a recognisable speech that begins to buzz and echo, steadily losing coherency until it's something alien and atonal. Even then, we can still hear something of the original -- the cadence and rhythm of Lucier's speech. Until at last, we don't, and we're left with something haunting and ethereal.

There's an intersection with a couple of things here. First off is where I started this note -- the idea of Umwelt and the visualisation of the self-driving car. Reinforcing what's demarcated as important and taking away what isn't gets us closer -- in a very limited way -- to the car's Umwelt. Does Lucier bring us closer, even a little, to the theoretical Umwelt of a room experiencing sounds?

(See here for a snapshot of James Bridle's visualisations, titled 'Activations'.)

The other is writing, where the process of revision is taking away everything that is not the thing and reinforcing the stuff that is the thing. That's my highly unsophisticated description of 'theme' and resonance in writing, but it's often the part of revision that makes a work really shine. Finding the resonant frequencies of the piece and looping through them until we have something new and interesting, or even haunting and ethereal.

Last thought: this is an example of encoding a property of physical space into an audio medium. I Am Sitting in a Room has fascinated for years, and continues to do so.

The Umwelt of Birds

I talk about birds a lot at the moment. They've been somewhat of a pandemic obsession and form of relief. But it's more than that -- it's about connecting with nature and the other living beings with which we share our environments.

Someone asked me last week how I felt about the extent to which birds are just fundamentally unknowable. No matter what emotions or interiority we put onto them, those are just fragments of our own experience and identity we're projecting. No matter what form of relationship we cultivate with any animal, there's a fundamental barrier there that we cannot cross.

My answer was that, for me, that's of the interest. Yes, I feel that barrier, but sometimes, it feels thin -- in those shared moments of seeing, where you feel like you are looking and being looked back at. I've had this with both crows and pigeons -- the two birds I've spent most time around during the pandemic. It's been abundantly clear that they are observing and responding to your behaviour in complex ways, beyond the most common mode of interaction of flight (in both the evasive/aversive and airborne sense) in response to your presence.

James Bridle's new book, Ways of Being, talks about umwelt -- the interior, existential experience -- in reference to non-human intelligences. He describes the process of training his own self-driving car and, while the umwelt of that intelligence is fundamentally unknowable to us, through visualisation of data we can 'see', in a sense, a little of how it does, by virtue of rendering what elements of an image it has designated as 'significant'.

This struck me with relation to the question about birds. We can't know what's happening inside of their own experience -- their umwelt -- but there is still something to be gaining from finding those places where our experiences of the outside world connect with one another. The horn of a passing car spooks the crows; makes me jump, spikes my heart rate, triggers my tic. I feel the peanut between my fingers; the crows watch hungrily, open their mouths in anticipation -- perhaps in request? Is it for me, or for them? Regardless, it is something they do in front of me when I am there. I fluff the throw, the peanut doesn't leave my hand as I intend. They watch. I wonder if they think I'm toying with them, whether they recognise the error. I don't get to know. They don't seem to mind.

It's Complicated

Many concepts can be explained concisely, in simple language, and we should all strive for clarity. But the aphorism [“If you can't explain it to a 6-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.”] is a mistake, for a number of thoughts approximate the carpenter’s craft, and to meaningfully reveal them requires time and attention. Sometimes these cannot simply be told to another at all, they must be grown. For a topical example, we know that maturity itself cannot be imparted to a six year old, no matter how good a summary we might give. Despite our understanding, we know it is something that can only come to each of us in time. This pattern is more common than we think. True things are disclosed slowly.

Articulating ideas as simply as possible is attractive, not least because getting people to agree with us is attractive. But we have a tendency to overrate ideas that can be shared easily, with the most apparent advantages. By constant simplifying, we may be lulled into abridging our own ideas a little too much, and sooner or later our audience—or ourselves—might come to expect only these truncated thoughts. What is easy to explain is not necessarily what is best. What is easy to understand is not necessarily what is true.

—Quote from Long Distance Thinking by Simon Sarris

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. There's a growing tendency to treat simplicity as a proxy for correctness (the thesis of Sarris's post above), and I think that's being entrenched through people's presence in spaces like Twitter.

Twitter encourages an abbreviated style -- both as an obvious artefact of form, and because of the culture of Twitter. There's a wildly disproportionate expectation of perfect purity and precision in a space that is by design pretty hostile to that. So on the one hand some people present things as categorical and simple (when they generally aren't) and on the other, people who try for nuance are attacked for not framing things perfectly and fully capturing all the subtleties.

Which is not to say Twitter has no value -- I just see it more and more as a means to learn about a thing in broad terms and then go away and seek to understand that thing elsewhere. The problem I've found (in myself) is when Twitter starts to infiltrate my way of thinking.

(I am, myself, simplifying here by using Twitter as a proxy for this way of thinking, but I think it's a pretty solid example of it.)

What it boils down to for me is that: many things are complicated. Not so much so that we can choose intellectual nihilism and abandon any sense of good, bad, right, and wrong. But Twitter rewards -- explicitly and implicitly -- oversimplifications that can't tolerate a thing being good and bad at the same time. To have it be a key lens on the world habituates one away from thinking in terms of complexity. And if we let that mindset overly influence our view on the world...

Well, we'd probably be about where we are.