Essay 1: The Poisoned Observer

Introduction:

In Ancient China, it was a confucian ritual to mourn for a period of three years after the death of the parent or grandparent. The period of three years was kept to match the period which a child takes to fully wean. Similar is the system of 12 or 13 day immediate mourning period in North India, followed by an extensive system of monthly and yearly customs. Because you are have been brought up within those systems, if you don’t do that, you will feel guilt. And people around you, who have the same kind of upbringing, would shame you into doing that.

This suggests that there is an internal system of values and rules and opinions which acts as the Framework by which all other things are described, assessed, and judged.

My basic thinking framework (as i understand) is Bayesian.

By definition, it is a rigid formal method with some math involved. It requires me to do the following steps:

Write down my assumptions and assign independent likelihood to them, before seeing the evidence. These are called Priors.
Then I see the evidence, in form of whatever I see, read, hear, think, experimental data. = Observations and Experiments.
And on that basis, I calculate the Posteriors. This Posterior then becomes the Prior for the next observation. Basically, I am running this loop continuously.


 Priors --- observations/experiments --> Posterior
   ^                                          |
    \----------continuous loop---------------/

However, this rigid mathematical system is not what I follow normally. In normal usage, I don’t do maths explicitly. It works more like:

I hold beliefs with degrees of confidence rather than binary true or false.
New evidence shifts those degrees - sometimes a little, other times a lot, depending upon how surprising the evidence is.
I don’t treat any belief as permanently settled. There is always a possibility that some new evidence in the future may change my current belief.

Where do the Priors Come from

Where do these prior positions comes from? I didn’t choose them from within. As in, I didn’t one day sat down and wrote (or mentally kept track) of all the base assumptions and positions. I grew up in a community and from that I inherited this framework of priors. ‘This is right, and that is wrong, and this is acceptable’ - all came from that community (We also call it Culture). And the mechanism of installation of that framework into my mind was through language, hence a better term is linguistic community.

Movies, pop songs, bhakti songs, poems, cultural and religious epics, stories, and puranas, fiction novels and short stories, manusmritis, tablets of Moses and Epictetus, parents, neighbors, and friends and their parents advices and warnings, spoken and written and unspoken laws and customs. I swim in this immense ocean of various ideas and assumptions and traditions. And these all subconsciously affect me and form my priors in all things and situations.

Thirty years back, I didn’t consider gay rights as an important thing to be considered in my mind (and for a long time, it remained unlawful in my country). But with time and slow diffusion from western culture, it creeped slowly my mindset. My view is agnostic - if someone wants to do it, it should be okay. Eventually, the Indian laws also changed in this regard, with eventual removal of unlawfulness of the act.

Do Priors Change

How did something which was not into any consideration in my mind thirty years back, slowly become one to put a small amount of energy about correctness or wrongness? This suggests that the positions change with time, because of all that swimming in the culture.

Either I can let the culture dictate those changes or I can actually check them myself and then based on rationality, tradition, logical reasoning steps, or emotion (observations and experiments) change them myself. Let the loop run from outside or consciously run it myself.

If I let the culture dictate it, it goes out of my control. Then either I get to hold confusing set of beliefs which themselves are unstable or I can take the control in my hand.

The Poisoned Observer

Who checks this? This checking of the system is itself done by a checker that is built upon priors. There is no pure unadulterated checker who can check everything and every layer in an unbiased manner. The checker is poisoned from all the priors. There is no solid fixed position from where you can check everything (or anything), and the rules for checking themselves are also based on all those priors. Everything, the checker, the rules for checking, and the things to be checked all are built upon by the Priors, and all these are installed through language by the linguistic community.

in other words, the observer is poisoned.

This situation is not a disaster. It makes me think of everything with humility, and not confidence (or over-confidence). Even when I am checking upon something, this entire chain of priors up to the checker tends to keep me humble and aware.

Belief Correction

Option 1:

Don’t check your beliefs. Most people are in this mode. They are completely outward looking and have no idea about their own beliefs.

Option 2:

Check only their superficial beliefs. Some people do that. What they don’t check is how they come to have those beliefs (comes from culture, their linguistic community, the family you grew up within, etc.)

Option 3:

Check the superficial beliefs, as well as the multiple layers of deeper beliefs. The deeper one goes, more effective is the effort of checking those foundational layers of beliefs.

Remember Pareto’s principle (80-20 principle, Power Law) - it says that 20% of efforts yield 80% of results. There is a layered pareto also - which multiplies this effect by itself. A two-layer Pareto says that 4% (20% of 20%) can have a 64% (80% of 80%) effect. And a three-layer says ~1% (20% of 20% of 20% = 0.8%) can have a 51% (80% of 80% of 80%) effect. As a fun sidenote, most societies have 1% of population having 50% of wealth - this is a burning point for many socialists. The power law is ubiquitous.

In case of option 3, if I go to second or third layers of beliefs, only 1-4% of efforts would tend to give me 50-64% effect in clarifying things for me. In other words, going deeper is very effective.

And the poisoned observer works in reverse also. When I change my beliefs, I change myself too.


        /-------------\                               /-------------\
        |Evaluation by |    observation               |  Posterior  |
Prior ->|Priors-based  | ->    and    -> Posteriors ->|    based    |
        |Framework of  |    experiment                | Framework of|
        |   Self       |                              |   Self      |  
        \-------------/                               \-------------/
                 ↖                                     ↗
                    linguistic community = hyperpriors

Line Diagram for the Hierarchical Bayes. The linguistic community has the so-called hyper-priors within it, from which the actual priors and the Observer himself who checks those priors are built upon. They do the observations and experiments and form the Posteriors as well as the Posterior based Checker for future.

Essay 2: Neurath’s Raft

Basic Metaphors

There is the Ship of Theseus idea, in which a ship gets changed over time, one plank by one plank, and the question asked is: is it the same ship or is it a different one? To make it harder, then they use those old discarded planks and use them to build an identical ship. Now, which one is the Ship of Theseus - is it the first one or the second reconstructed one? It is a very intriguing philosophical question.

On these lines, there is another ship problem - ship of Neurath. In this, they say that they are trying to build a ship in the ocean itself. So, they do not have the luxury to build it one plank by one plank. They have to build it in a way that the smallest, earliest first unit is itself able to float. And then they build upon that floating thing one plank by one plank, and that creates a final ship or Raft.

Now, these are two completely different philosophies. Build a ship in the shipyard - use good machines, perfectly cut planks, perfectly planned structural and engineering blueprints - and you get a perfect ship. Perfect in the sense of making one in the yard. The Titanic was perfectly built in the shipyard but when it went out in the ocean world, it didn’t even complete a single journey - so much for perfectness. And the other side: you start building upon whatever is available, whether that is a good plank or a half-rotten plank, a properly cut one or a half-disintegrated partial plank. You use it to build upon the raft. Tie the ropes. Keep it functional right from the start - and with time, without ever neglecting that functionality at any point in time - keeping it afloat at all times - you make a bigger or better or more efficient or faster or more stable ship.

Application to Thinking System

Now, this system, this metaphor, is applicable to my body of knowledge, my philosophical system. I started with something. Now, that start was based upon my childhood culture, the places I lived, the cultures of those places - those got incorporated as the first little raft.

Many people don’t add anything to that original culture, original raft. They say: okay, we have been floating well since our childhood and we don’t find any particular reason to change or improve our raft, because there is always a possibility that in trying to improve it, they can disimprove it - they can cause the untying of a base, the untying of a rope which would collapse their own raft. So, they don’t want to take that risk. There is nothing wrong with that kind of approach.

Propaganda - which is a good label - is basically the modification of those default rafts. To guide people who don’t want to change the raft into a particular direction. Now, that direction is decided by those who are creating the propaganda, creating the mass media, the influencers of the mass media - those are the people who are creating those default rafts or modifying them. And people who don’t want to change the rafts on their own just keep on using these default rafts. And default rafts are not always bad - they are there because of a reason. They help in floating people continuously. But a floating raft doesn’t have a direction. It just flows with the river.

And the propagandists, the mass media, the academia’s high priests (in a coordinated or uncoordinated manner) - they change the default rafts - in a guided way, self-consciously, or completely dependent upon each other. Some give them theory, system. Depending upon the direction of the river (=reality), the flow of the river - widening, narrowing, up and down, slow and fast, these entities change the default rafts - what can be done, what cannot be done. Moral laws, social laws and customs, rhetoric, everything is used.

I always have the choice to change my raft. I can take instruction from people who have changed their rafts. I can take instructions from how the default raft was there, say 40 years back, or 100 years back, or 2000 years back. I can study that the default past raft was like this and the current raft is like that, and I can incorporate the better parts of this and that rafts. I can even back to the older raft system, or I can create a hybrid, or I can take the help of multiple older raft systems and synthesize a completely new one. I can become a path-breaker. What I want to do, that is up to me.

General Idea

Understanding what raft you are floating on gives you your priors. And you have to continuously build upon that particular raft, chaing one plank at a time, sometimes tightening few, sometimes removing few. Over time, maybe you will get a faster, better, stabler ship. Maybe you will disentangle and destroy your raft. If you have the self-confidence that you can build a newer raft in any situation, then you can be more aggressive in this ship-building process. In the process of untangling, it is possible that you may drown in laziness or inability to build a corner raft. Sometimes people undergo life situations, in which the storm blows up their rafts - they get confused about how they used to view the world and how it actually worked. All kinds of metaphorical combinations are possible.

So, coming back to the original idea: get your priors, find out upon them - beliefs, values. Then use a good lens or multiple good lenses to look upon a newer text - in other words, a new thinking engineering manual. You need to learn the mathematical, physics, and chemistry rules in that, and then see how much you can use that newer manual to change your original raft. What is different. Why should you add something or subtract many things. The superfluous baggage, the garbage which you have been carrying on your raft - which was slowing it down or making it prone to drowning - all those things can be addressed.

And while you are doing that, you still need a continuously floating raft, and you can build upon a ship on that.

One of the special insights of the hierarchical Bayesian (from Essay 1 - The poisoned observer) is that the raft builder himself is made of those planks of the raft. When you change the planks, something changes in the raft builder also - that picture has to be kept in mind.

In Short

The default raft is the hyper-priors received from culture and upbringing, good or bad, and it is constantly being replaced. The Bayesian system is there, the default raft is there. Observations, books, philosophies, culture, mass media, our own experiences are there. If the intent and efforts are there, then the raft can be strengthened or made better. If no intent or no efforts, then it will float without doing anything on own! Choose!