If evolutionary biology metaphors for social epistemology is your cup of tea, you may find this discussion I had with ChatGPT interesting. 🍵
(Also, sorry for not optimizing this; but I rarely find time to write anything publishable, so I thought just sharing as-is was better than not sharing at all. I recommend the footnotes btw!)
At least sorta. There’s a host of mechanisms mostly sharing the same domain and effects with the more precisely-defined Zollman effect, and I’m saying “Zollman-like” to refer to the group of them. Probably I should find a better word.
Background
Once upon a time, the common ancestor of the palm trees Howea forsteriana and Howea belmoreana on Howe Island would pollinate each other more or less uniformly during each flowering cycle. This was “panmictic” because everybody was equally likely to mix with everybody else.
Then there came a day when the counterfactual descendants had had enough. Due to varying soil profiles on the island, they all had to compromise between fitness for each soil type—or purely specialize in one and accept the loss of all seeds which landed on the wrong soil. “This seems inefficient,” one of them observed. A few of them nodded in agreement and conspired to gradually desynchronize their flowering intervals from their conspecifics, so that they would primarily pollinate each other rather than having to uniformly mix with everybody. They had created a cline.
And a cline once established, permits the gene pools of the assortatively-pollinating palms to further specialize toward different mesa-niches within their original meta-niche. Given that a crossbreed between palms adapted for different soil types is going to be less adaptive for either niche,[1] you have a positive feedback cycle where they increasingly desynchronize (to minimize crossbreeding) and increasingly specialize. Solve for the general equilibrium and you get sympatric speciation.[2]
Notice that their freedom to specialize toward their respective mesa-niches is proportional to their reproductive isolation (or inversely proportional to the gene flow between them). The more panmictic they are, the more selection-pressure there is on them to retain 1) genetic performance across the population-weighted distribution of all the mesa-niches in the environment, and 2) cross-compatibility with the entire population (since you can’t choose your mates if you’re a wind-pollinating palm tree).[3]
From evo bio to socioepistemology
I love this as a metaphor for social epistemology, and the potential detrimental effects of “panmictic communication”. Sorta related to the Zollman effect, but more general. If you have an epistemic community that are trying to grow knowledge about a range of different “epistemic niches”, then widespread pollination (communication) is obviously good because it protects against e.g. inbreeding depression of local subgroups (e.g. echo chambers, groupthink, etc.), and because researchers can coordinate to avoid redundant work, and because ideas tend to inspire other ideas; but it can also be detrimental because researchers who try to keep up with the ideas and technical jargon being developed across the community (especially related to everything that becomes a “hot topic”) will have less time and relative curiosity to specialize in their focus area (“outbreeding depression”).
A particularly good example of this is the effective altruism community. Given that they aspire to prioritize between all the world’s problems, and due to the very high-dimensional search space generalized altruism implies, and due to how tight-knit the community’s discussion fora are (the EA forum, LessWrong, EAGs, etc.), they tend to learn an extremely wide range of topics. I think this is awesome, and usually produces better results than narrow academic fields, but nonetheless there’s a tradeoff here.
The rather untargeted gene-flow implied by wind-pollination is a good match to mostly-online meme-flow of the EA community. You might think that EAs will adequately speciate and evolve toward subniches due to the intractability of keeping up with everything, and indeed there are many subcommunities that branch into different focus areas. But if you take cognitive biases into account, and the constant desire people have to be *relevant* to the largest audience they can find (preferential attachment wrt hot topics), plus fear-of-missing-out, and fear of being “caught unaware” of some newly-developed jargon (causing people to spend time learning everything that risks being mentioned in live conversations[4]), it’s unlikely that they couldn’t benefit from smarter and more fractal ways to specialize their niches. Part of that may involve more “horizontally segmented” communication.
Tagging @Holly_Elmore because evobio metaphors is definitely your cup of tea, and a lot of it is inspired by stuff I first learned from you. Thanks! : )
Think of it like… if you’re programming something based on the assumption that it will run on Linux xor Windows, it’s gonna be much easier to reach a given level of quality compared to if you require it to be cross-compatible.
Sympatric speciation is rare because the pressure to be compatible with your conspecifics is usually quite high (Allee effects↦ network effects). But it is still possible once selection-pressures from “disruptive selection” exceed the “heritage threshold” relative to each mesa-niche.[5]
This homegenification of evolutionary selection-pressures is akin to markets converging to an equilibrium price. It too depends on panmixia of customers and sellers for a given product. If customers are able to buy from anybody anywhere, differential pricing (i.e. trying to sell your product at above or below equilibrium price for a subgroup of customers) becomes impossible.
This is also known (by me and at least one other person...) as the “jabber loop”:
This highlight the utter absurdity of being afraid of having our ignorance exposed, and going ’round judging each other for what we don’t know. If we all worry overmuch about what we don’t know, we’ll all get stuck reading and talking about stuff in the Jabber loop. The more of our collective time we give to the Jabber loop, the more unusual it will be to be ignorant of what’s in there, which means the social punishments for Jabber-ignorance will get evenharsher.
To take this up a notch: sympatric speciation occurs when a cline in the population extends across a separatrix (red) in the dynamic landscape, and the attractors (blue) on each side overpower the cohering forces from Allee effects (orange). This is the doodle I drew on a post-it note to illustrate that pattern in different context:
I dub him the mascot of bullshit-math. Isn’t he pretty?
I tend to deliberately use jargon-dense language because I think that’s usually a good thing. Something we discuss in the chat.
I also just personally seem to learn much faster by reading jargon-dense stuff.
As long as the jargon is apt, it highlights the importance of a concept (“oh, it’s so generally-applicable that it’s got a name of its own?”).
If it’s a new idea expressed in normal words, the meaning may (ill-advisably) snap into some old framework I have, and I fail to notice that there’s something new to grok about it. Otoh, if it’s a new word, I’ll definitely notice when I don’t know it.
I prefer a jargon-dump which forces me to look things up, compared to fluent text where I can’t quickly scan for things I don’t already know.
I don’t feel the need to understand everything in a text in order to benefit from it. If I’m reading something with a 100% hit-rate wrt what I manage to understand, that’s not gonna translate to a very high learning-rate.
To clarify: By “jargon” I didn’t mean to imply anything negative. I just mean “new words for concepts”. They’re often the most significant mutations in the meme pool, and are necessary to make progress. If anything, the EA community should consider upping the rate at which they invent jargon, to facilitate specialization of concepts and put existing terms (competing over the same niches) under more selection-pressure.
I suspect the problems people have with jargon is mostly that they are *unable* to change them even if they’re anti-helpfwl. So they get the sense that “darn, these jargonisms are bad, but they’re stuck in social equilibrium, so I can’t change them—it would be better if hadn’t created them in the first place.” The conclusion is premature, however, since you can improve things either by disincentivizing the creation of bad jargon, *or* increasing people’s willingness to create them, so that bad terms get replaced at a higher rate.
That said, if people still insist on trying to learn all the jargon created everywhere because they’ll feel embarrassed being caught unaware, increasing the jargon-rate could cause problems (including spending too much time on the forum!). But, again, this is a problem largely caused by impostor syndrome, and pluralistic ignorance/overestimation about how much their peers know. The appropriate solution isn’t to reduce memetic mutation-rate, but rather to make people feel safer revealing their ignorance (and thereby also increasing the rate of learning-opportunities).
Naive solutions like “let’s reduce jargon” are based on partial-equilibrium analysis. It can be compared to a “second-best theory” which is only good on the margin because the system is stuck in a local optimum and people aren’t searching for solutions which require U-shaped jumps[1] (slack) or changing multiple variables at once. And as always when you optimize complex social problems (or manually nudge conditions on partial differential equations): “solve for the general equilibrium”.
If evolutionary biology metaphors for social epistemology is your cup of tea, you may find this discussion I had with ChatGPT interesting. 🍵
(Also, sorry for not optimizing this; but I rarely find time to write anything publishable, so I thought just sharing as-is was better than not sharing at all. I recommend the footnotes btw!)
Glossary/metaphors
Howea palm trees ↦ EA community
Wind-pollination ↦ “panmictic communication”
Sympatric speciation ↦ horizontal segmentation
Ecological niches ↦ “epistemic niches”
Inbreeding depression ↦ echo chambers
Outbreeding depression (and Baker’s law) ↦ “Zollman-like effects”
At least sorta. There’s a host of mechanisms mostly sharing the same domain and effects with the more precisely-defined Zollman effect, and I’m saying “Zollman-like” to refer to the group of them. Probably I should find a better word.
Background
Once upon a time, the common ancestor of the palm trees Howea forsteriana and Howea belmoreana on Howe Island would pollinate each other more or less uniformly during each flowering cycle. This was “panmictic” because everybody was equally likely to mix with everybody else.
Then there came a day when the counterfactual descendants had had enough. Due to varying soil profiles on the island, they all had to compromise between fitness for each soil type—or purely specialize in one and accept the loss of all seeds which landed on the wrong soil. “This seems inefficient,” one of them observed. A few of them nodded in agreement and conspired to gradually desynchronize their flowering intervals from their conspecifics, so that they would primarily pollinate each other rather than having to uniformly mix with everybody. They had created a cline.
And a cline once established, permits the gene pools of the assortatively-pollinating palms to further specialize toward different mesa-niches within their original meta-niche. Given that a crossbreed between palms adapted for different soil types is going to be less adaptive for either niche,[1] you have a positive feedback cycle where they increasingly desynchronize (to minimize crossbreeding) and increasingly specialize. Solve for the general equilibrium and you get sympatric speciation.[2]
Notice that their freedom to specialize toward their respective mesa-niches is proportional to their reproductive isolation (or inversely proportional to the gene flow between them). The more panmictic they are, the more selection-pressure there is on them to retain 1) genetic performance across the population-weighted distribution of all the mesa-niches in the environment, and 2) cross-compatibility with the entire population (since you can’t choose your mates if you’re a wind-pollinating palm tree).[3]
From evo bio to socioepistemology
Tagging @Holly_Elmore because evobio metaphors is definitely your cup of tea, and a lot of it is inspired by stuff I first learned from you. Thanks! : )
Think of it like… if you’re programming something based on the assumption that it will run on Linux xor Windows, it’s gonna be much easier to reach a given level of quality compared to if you require it to be cross-compatible.
Sympatric speciation is rare because the pressure to be compatible with your conspecifics is usually quite high (Allee effects ↦ network effects). But it is still possible once selection-pressures from “disruptive selection” exceed the “heritage threshold” relative to each mesa-niche.[5]
This homegenification of evolutionary selection-pressures is akin to markets converging to an equilibrium price. It too depends on panmixia of customers and sellers for a given product. If customers are able to buy from anybody anywhere, differential pricing (i.e. trying to sell your product at above or below equilibrium price for a subgroup of customers) becomes impossible.
This is also known (by me and at least one other person...) as the “jabber loop”:
To take this up a notch: sympatric speciation occurs when a cline in the population extends across a separatrix (red) in the dynamic landscape, and the attractors (blue) on each side overpower the cohering forces from Allee effects (orange). This is the doodle I drew on a post-it note to illustrate that pattern in different context:
I dub him the mascot of bullshit-math. Isn’t he pretty?
And a follow-up on why I encourage the use of jargon.
Mutation-rate ↦ “jargon-rate”
I tend to deliberately use jargon-dense language because I think that’s usually a good thing. Something we discuss in the chat.
I also just personally seem to learn much faster by reading jargon-dense stuff.
As long as the jargon is apt, it highlights the importance of a concept (“oh, it’s so generally-applicable that it’s got a name of its own?”).
If it’s a new idea expressed in normal words, the meaning may (ill-advisably) snap into some old framework I have, and I fail to notice that there’s something new to grok about it. Otoh, if it’s a new word, I’ll definitely notice when I don’t know it.
I prefer a jargon-dump which forces me to look things up, compared to fluent text where I can’t quickly scan for things I don’t already know.
I don’t feel the need to understand everything in a text in order to benefit from it. If I’m reading something with a 100% hit-rate wrt what I manage to understand, that’s not gonna translate to a very high learning-rate.
A “U-shaped jump” is required for everything with activation costs/switching costs.