Coherency and the Game Combos

In sta­tis­tics, one learns very early on that inde­pen­dent ran­dom vari­a­tions tend to can­cel out when grouped together. By the law of large num­bers, the col­lec­tive behav­ior of many inde­pen­dent ran­dom enti­ties tends to closely reflect the aver­age behav­ior of these enti­ties. This is very con­ve­nient if we see the ran­dom vari­a­tions as being mean­ing­less noise and were only inter­ested in the aver­age. But if the vari­a­tions con­tained all the inter­est­ing com­plex­ity, then the com­plex­ity is washed away in the aggre­gate. In a generic soci­ety, the gener­ics may be highly var­ied and indi­vid­u­ally very com­plex. Naively put them in a group and the col­lec­tive behav­ior is sim­pler – quite plau­si­bly, the vari­a­tions can­cel toward zero and the group achieves noth­ing as a whole.

This all changes if the ran­dom vari­a­tions were not inde­pen­dent and tended to align along cer­tain dimen­sions. The vari­a­tions will be ampli­fied wher­ever they align, and the col­lec­tive behav­ior of the group cleanly empha­sizes the align­ment of its con­stituents. If we want a group of gener­ics to retain a mean­ing­ful iden­tity dis­tinct from the aver­age of its mem­bers, we need to give the gener­ics a desire to align with each other in behav­ior or moti­va­tion. The topic of today’s post is the coherency domain, which con­tains ideas that lend well to being mixed with other con­structs to describe non­triv­ial social behav­iors. As an exam­ple, I will use con­cepts from the coherency domain to describe the gam­ing com­bos, which are a set of meth­ods for cre­at­ing align­ment even between unre­lated or mutu­ally exclu­sive activ­i­ties through the com­mon par­tic­i­pa­tion of a big­ger event.

The OpenSense Domain

Communication is essen­tial in allow­ing indi­vid­u­als to coop­er­ate in group activ­ity, espe­cially if the indi­vid­u­als dif­fer in their roles or char­ac­ter­is­tics. Having open access to infor­ma­tion greatly boosts the pro­duc­tiv­ity of a group – in fact, this is the moti­vat­ing prin­ci­ple behind the inven­tion of patents, the inter­net, and open source soft­ware. Similarly, mem­bers of a team are expected to openly share their thoughts and ten­den­cies so that the team can make up for each other’s weak­nesses. In the OpenSense domain, we dis­cuss what hap­pens when impor­tant facets of generic thought are openly expressed and eas­ily sensed by oth­ers in the envi­ron­ment. We will talk about how gener­ics in this domain tend to form friend­ship groups, share infor­ma­tion about them­selves, and engage in play activ­i­ties designed to uncover highly var­ied aspects of each other’s per­son­al­i­ties. The senses in this domain are anal­o­gous to human emo­tions and the invol­un­tary facial expres­sions / body lan­guage used to express such emo­tions1, but in this post I will mostly focus on the OpenSense dynam­ics in its pure form and only use human behav­iors as illus­tra­tive examples.

The Rivalry Domain

Previously, I’ve been talk­ing in broad terms about very gen­eral con­cepts in profi­ci­ol­ogy. This will be the first time I nar­row my focus into a spe­cific domain. A domain is a restricted set­ting with only a small num­ber of rel­e­vant events / senses / agents – basi­cally a toy prob­lem, or a sim­pli­fied model envi­ron­ment. The hope is that we can use impor­tant ideas from these domains as fun­da­men­tal build­ing blocks that will help us ana­lyze more com­plex setups. In other words, we should be able to build more inter­est­ing / real­is­tic gener­ics by mix­ing & match­ing sim­ple com­po­nents from mul­ti­ple domains, as if we were build­ing a com­plex mol­e­cule atom-by-atom.

In this post we will talk about the Rivalry domain, which focuses on events where one generic ben­e­fits at another generic’s loss. I will sup­ple­ment my expla­na­tion with for­mal nota­tion loosely based on func­tional pro­gram­ming lan­guages. I am not requir­ing (or expect­ing) read­ers to have a back­ground in com­puter sci­ence – it’s just that this kind of nota­tion is very use­ful for describ­ing non­triv­ial generic behav­iors through the com­po­si­tion of sim­pler con­structs. In any case, I will be explain­ing this func­tional nota­tion as I go.

The Scientific Method in Proficiology

In a sense, study­ing generic sen­tient beings is kind of like study­ing a fic­tional uni­verse. There’s no obvi­ous notion of accu­racy or cor­rect­ness – after all, a generic mind is not nec­es­sar­ily an accu­rate depic­tion of human psy­chol­ogy. The whole field seems kind of self-con­tained and any state­ment about the world of the gener­ics frankly appears unfal­si­fi­able, in the same way that the­o­ries about a fic­tional uni­verse are impos­si­ble to dis­prove through experiment.

Why should we care about such fic­tional domains? When there are high stakes to explain or under­stand a phe­nom­e­non, we look toward sci­ence for answers. It is tempt­ing to treat sci­en­tific con­cepts as con­crete things that objec­tively exist, mak­ing sci­en­tific the­o­ries seem much more tightly grounded in real­ity than the afore­men­tioned the­o­ries around fic­tional uni­verses. But I argue that in many cases, the two are not all that dif­fer­ent. Of course, I am not say­ing that sci­en­tific work is purely fic­tional. All bod­ies of sci­ence agree that state­ments must be tested against real-world obser­va­tions in order to be taken seri­ously. However, there are many dif­fer­ent ways to do sci­en­tific work, and by group­ing these meth­ods under a com­mon name we are desen­si­tiz­ing our­selves to their dif­fer­ences. In point­ing out these dif­fer­ences, I will show you how sci­en­tific the­ory can be more fan­tas­ti­cal than we ini­tially expect.

Agents – The Source of Motivation and Action

The last two posts2 were focused on the lens. They dis­cussed its var­i­ous modes of oper­a­tion, the dichotomy between the out­ward-fac­ing “causal esti­mate” and the inward-fac­ing “eval­u­a­tion”, and the prob­lems of for­eign con­text and overgeneralization.

But it’s impor­tant to note that the lens is, at heart, a sta­tis­ti­cal machine. It is only con­cerned with how accu­rately it can per­form its tasks (casual pre­dic­tion, event inter­pre­ta­tion etc.), and does not inten­tion­ally dis­tort itself to sat­isfy any agenda. In other words, the lens lacks agency and a hypo­thet­i­cal “lens-only” generic is only good for mak­ing unin­ter­ested pre­dic­tions or clas­si­fi­ca­tions3.

To breathe more life into the generic mind I intro­duced the agent, a cog­ni­tive process with an inher­ent goal to cause the pro­duc­tion of cer­tain eval­u­a­tions. The con­cept behind its oper­a­tion is as follows:

  • Use the lens to per­form value pre­dic­tion. In other words, given some known prior infor­ma­tion and the desired eval­u­a­tions, fig­ure out what must be in the pos­te­rior infor­ma­tion for the lens to pro­duce such an evaluation.
  • Try to engi­neer the actions and cir­cum­stances of the generic to increase the odds that the right events hap­pen. If this is done suc­cess­fully then the lens will pro­duce the eval­u­a­tions that the agent desires.

Hunches, Guesses, and Mistakes

Now, we see the lens for what it truly is –
A
pow­er­ful but flawed entity grop­ing its way through an inter­nal environment.

We probed the inner work­ings of the generic mind and famil­iar­ized our­selves with lenses in our pre­vi­ous post. We also learned from the mere exis­tence of issues like the prob­lem of for­eign con­text that lenses can be less than per­fect. Now it’s time to take this issue to the next level and call our atten­tion to greater flaws lurk­ing just beneath the sur­face. We will begin by casu­ally observ­ing a lens in its nat­ural envi­ron­ment, and will even­tu­ally end by tor­tur­ing the poor spec­i­men with a bat­tery of thought experiments.

The Internal Environment

What is the best word to describe an abstract space gov­erned by a set of rules, capa­ble of host­ing enti­ties that inter­act with one another accord­ing to these rules? A group? A field? A sys­tem? I tend to think of these as envi­ron­ments, no mat­ter how abstract its rules or enti­ties may be. Just as the Earth is an envi­ron­ment occu­pied by count­less liv­ing organ­isms, the Internet can be thought of as an envi­ron­ment for data and pro­grams, and per­haps the law can be seen as an envi­ron­ment filled with doc­u­ments and his­toric cases. In much the same way, each generic sen­tient being con­tains a unique inter­nal envi­ron­ment host­ing a com­plex inter­ac­tion between mem­o­ries, emo­tions, and beliefs. Every obser­va­tion, action and moment spent in deep thought will affect the rela­tion­ship between the enti­ties in this inter­nal envi­ron­ment, even if the effects can be quite sub­tle. Conversely, the inter­nal envi­ron­ment will strongly affect the judg­ments a generic will make and the actions he will take. In fact, the inter­nal envi­ron­ment is prob­a­bly just as impor­tant to a generic as the exter­nal envi­ron­ment that he lives in.

Of Lenses and Experiences

What secrets can we find, deep within the generic mind?
What secrets will he find, through lenses trapped within his own mind?

In my pre­vi­ous post, I explained how con­text deeply per­me­ates every thought and action in the generic soci­ety, and how mis­takes such as the inter­nal attri­bu­tion error or the ratio­nal choice assump­tion con­stantly pre­vent gener­ics from con­nect­ing with one another. Did my over­all pes­simism about the gener­ics’ abil­ity to under­stand con­text change the way you view their soci­ety? Are most gener­ics forced to expe­ri­ence life in total emo­tional iso­la­tion? What value is there in a life with­out shared expe­ri­ences or the abil­ity to form a deeper con­nec­tion with others?

Sure, the gener­ics con­stantly fight or argue over petty issues, but at least they haven’t col­lec­tively despaired and declared all their inter­ac­tions mean­ing­less. Generics are usu­ally aware of their lim­ited abil­ity to con­tex­tu­al­ize each other’s actions, so clearly they must still value some­thing. As it turns out, gener­ics aren’t fatal­is­tic beings wait­ing for a mean­ing­less life to flash before their eyes. Each generic sen­tient being is on a jour­ney of self-improve­ment, slowly tweak­ing his beliefs to accom­mo­date the seem­ingly incom­pre­hen­si­ble choices of those around him. The gener­ics will find mean­ing in their inter­pre­ta­tions and judg­ments even if they later find flaws in their rea­son­ing. They feel euphoric when they under­stand a friend slightly bet­ter than before, even if his choices still seem like a com­plete mys­tery. If you had back­door access to the generic mind, you could watch hun­dreds of gener­ics bump­ing into one another try­ing mak­ing sense of their jum­bled world, and truly appre­ci­ate the inevitabil­ity of this life­long jour­ney. The ana­lyst in me nat­u­rally wanted to know if these gener­ics had any hope of suc­cess. Of course, in my attempt to answer this ques­tion I ended up cre­at­ing a very com­plex the­ory on the inner work­ings of the generic mind.

Out of Context, Out of Reach

In a con­fus­ing world where no move makes sense,
We must look deeper into the fog and see the con­text behind each event as it unfolds.

Without tele­pathic abil­i­ties, we could never know for sure how other peo­ple think or why they choose to behave in cer­tain ways. This def­i­nitely hasn’t stopped us from try­ing though – our minds tire­lessly pro­duce, refine and share orga­nized beliefs (or schemata) about how oth­ers act based on our past expe­ri­ences. These beliefs are some­times based on time-tested the­o­ries in psy­chol­ogy, but more often than not they’re just basic intu­itions a per­son has about his friends or ene­mies. Whether we choose to laugh away a person’s quirky behav­ior, briefly scowl at an act of impo­lite­ness, or openly attack a group of indi­vid­u­als after one of its mem­bers did some­thing slightly unpleas­ant, we mostly rely on schemata to inter­pret and even­tu­ally judge each other’s actions.

Our hard-earned beliefs don’t gen­er­al­ize to the unpre­dictable thoughts and deci­sions of the generic sen­tient beings though. In the absence of other infor­ma­tion, a generic’s actions essen­tially have no inher­ent meaning.

The Tale of the Generics

An intro­duc­tion to a strange mind and how its sci­en­tific way of think­ing cre­ated a model world pop­u­lated by generic sen­tient beings, or “gener­ics”.

My mind tries very hard to make me think like a sci­en­tist. On the one hand, sub­con­scious processes con­stantly scan my thoughts for claims to prove or dis­prove. After spend­ing a brief moment ana­lyz­ing, my mind would either reward me with a stamp of approval, or it would play devil’s advo­cate and make a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment of some kind. I can’t con­fi­dently make a state­ment until it passes a bat­tery of qual­ity assur­ance tests. Even then, the words would come out of my mouth with a gen­er­ous amount of uncer­tainty mixed in. On the other hand, my mind pre­vents me from tak­ing any­thing at face value. It believes that every event has a cause; that every action has motives; that every belief has ratio­nale behind it. Like a curi­ous child, it would stop me in my tracks, point to some­thing and ask why?. If I couldn’t keep up with this per­pet­ual stream of why?‘s, I would be pun­ished with a nag­ging sense of dis­sat­is­fac­tion last­ing for weeks.

For the most part, this quirk of mine didn’t bother me too much. I sup­pose it made me a weirder per­son by forc­ing me to spend an unusual amount of time read­ing text­books, watch­ing edu­ca­tional YouTube videos, and aim­lessly pac­ing around the neigh­bor­hood in deep thought. It prob­a­bly also played a part in devel­op­ing my affin­ity toward research papers and com­puter source code as opposed to news arti­cles, essays or nov­els. But soon enough, I found a more seri­ous prob­lem. When I find myself in front of other peo­ple, I’d feel an uncom­fort­able urge to ques­tion the motives behind their every action. What did his words really mean? What is he try­ing to get out of this meet­ing? If I was unlucky, my wor­ries over a friendly con­ver­sa­tion would snow­ball into a fran­tic analy­sis of sev­eral imag­ined per­son­al­i­ties, anno­tated by the solu­tions to var­i­ous zero-sum games.

Against my bet­ter judg­ment, my mind decided to study some psy­chol­ogy and soci­ol­ogy in order to under­stand peo­ple bet­ter. My inten­sive study­ing brought me close to many great ideas, but as mean­ing­ful as the two sub­jects were I knew they couldn’t cap­ture the intri­cate details of how a per­son thinks and acts. Besides, aca­d­e­mic study clearly wouldn’t make me feel less uncom­fort­able in front of another per­son. In a stroke of luck, my mind one day decided to stop over-com­pli­cat­ing every inter­ac­tion I had with other peo­ple. It hadn’t given up its quest for answers; it instead chose to tackle the prob­lem from a dif­fer­ent angle. It was going to design a grossly sim­pli­fied model of human soci­ety, and study that model instead. I was a lit­tle shocked by how bizarre this idea was, but I mostly just felt thank­ful for being able to talk to other peo­ple with­out hav­ing to ana­lyze their every word.

From that point on, my mind would pull out an imag­i­nary note­book and silently scrib­ble away when­ever I watched a movie, met another per­son, or sat idly in front of my com­puter lis­ten­ing to a nearby group of peo­ple hav­ing a pas­sion­ate con­ver­sa­tion. In my dreams, my mind would take out the note­book and sum­mon the var­i­ous crea­tures described in its pages. I later jok­ingly decided to call these crea­tures generic sen­tient beings (or gener­ics for short). As my mind tire­lessly worked on improv­ing its model, I watched the gener­ics grad­u­ally trans­form from mind­less logi­cians to lively beings full of dreams and aspi­ra­tions. They ini­tially ignored each other and lived soli­tary lives, but even­tu­ally they started to share their expe­ri­ences and iden­tify them­selves as mem­bers of a generic soci­ety. The more con­fused I felt with the real world and its ambigu­ous catch-all terms like equal­ity, intel­li­gence and love, the closer my mind grew to its world of generic sen­tient beings.

In a strange way, this model world lacked struc­ture. Generics often thought or acted in alien ways that defied com­mon sense. No two gener­ics held the same beliefs, felt the same emo­tions or inter­preted events in the same way. The generic soci­ety always wavered in its core val­ues, never set­tling on a uni­ver­sal code of ethics. Nonetheless, this world fas­ci­nated my mind. Despite the unpre­dictabil­ity of the race as a whole, there were clear rea­sons behind every choice a generic made. There was always a motive behind a con­scious act; a set of hopes and dreams explain­ing every moment of frus­tra­tion and burst of excite­ment. It’s some­times impos­si­ble to find and truly appre­ci­ate these rea­sons with­out an omni­scient point of view; from the eyes of another generic, the truth tends to feel incom­plete, super­fi­cial even. Still, this model world offered more clar­ity than one could ever hope to glean from the real world.

More impor­tantly, my mind saw great poten­tial hid­ing within the generic sen­tient beings. Their soci­ety func­tioned remark­ably smoothly con­sid­er­ing how dis­sim­i­lar its mem­bers were. Though the gener­ics always felt frus­trated and mis­un­der­stood, they could still form mean­ing­ful friend­ships and coop­er­ate toward big­ger goals (albeit inef­fi­ciently). My mind was con­vinced that with very min­i­mal out­side influ­ence, the gener­ics can learn to dras­ti­cally improve their own lives. A pair of gener­ics could hold friendly con­ver­sa­tions about their lives even if they fun­da­men­tally dif­fered in their core val­ues and beliefs. A closely knit group of gener­ics would be sen­si­tive enough to lift each other’s spir­its in times of need, and dar­ing enough to argue against each other when any mem­ber goes too far. When faced with a large prob­lem, the generic soci­ety can feel rea­son­ably con­fi­dent that its minds will coop­er­ate and even­tu­ally offer a solu­tion. The gener­ics would then agree to carry out the solu­tion even if half of them believed in a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent approach. I felt my mind shift gears as it began to search for the strate­gies needed to help the gener­ics live up to their full poten­tial. After spend­ing all its time cre­at­ing the model, my mind’s work had really just begun. Feeling a bit play­ful at the time, I coined a new word to describe my mind’s bud­ding research into its model world: Proficiology.

At this point, my mind has taken so many notes that it’s start­ing to run low on imag­i­nary note­books. I think the time is ripe to tran­si­tion to a dig­i­tal note­book and intro­duce the generic sen­tient beings to other minds. I hope you’ll find generic lives just as fas­ci­nat­ing as I did. Maybe you too will come up with great ways to improve the generic soci­ety. If I’m lucky, one of you might even cre­ate your own world of generic sen­tient beings, mak­ing gen­er­ickind a truly inter­plan­e­tary civ­i­liza­tion. You don’t nec­es­sar­ily have to do any­thing though; my only goal here is to keep the tale of the gener­ics alive and to keep our minds spinning.