Fingunt Simul Creduntque (On Hypocrisy)
"Hypocrisy" is one of those words with an obvious, well-understood meaning that gets curiouser the more closely you look at it. In Greek plays the hypokrites was the actor, the pretender, and it's easy enough to see how the modern meaning descended from this -- we call someone a hypocrite who makes a pretense with which their actions stand in contradiction. They're assuming a persona -- originally "that through which sound travels", after the masks worn on stage by the players.
But when you break the word down to its components things get a little weird: hypo- means "under" and the root word krinein's unvarnished meaning is "to sift", which by progressive metaphorical polishing becomes "to separate, to distinguish, to discriminate, to select, to judge, to decide" (whence a critic as one who exhibits refined discrimination and a crisis as the moment of judgment). The usual etymologies given for the total word strike me as convoluted and being less consistent with other uses of hypo- than the straightforward one: hypocrisy is the state of being under-critical, as when one is wrapped up in a play and suspending one's disbelief. By symmetry, we might say that being over-critical is hypercrisy, which, tellingly, isn't in the dictionary.
An accusation of hypocrisy, then, can be seen as an accusation of sifting some sphere of reality with too coarse a mesh -- applying an abstract standard which we don't cleave to in our own actions -- in the service of keeping up appearances.
* * * * *"The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light."
-- Matthew 6:22 (KJV)
Brains order sensations into a perceptual field that functions as a stand-in -- that is, a representation -- of an environment, which is then filtered through aptic structures to select an appropriate behavior from a vast set of potentialities. If representation is the inferential bridge between stimulus and response, then the richness of the representation will be proportional to the variety of possible responses and the expected value of picking the right one -- because dense representations take more resources to generate than sparse ones.
We receive signals through noisy channels, which means they decay with distance -- atmosphere scatters light, past performance doesn't guarantee future returns, information mutates as it gets passed from person to person, etc. This creates uncertainty about distant things, but that's not so bad because the number of things we could potentially do about things also tends to decrease as a function of distance in any case. Since there tend to be a relatively small number of behaviors appropriate to things that are distant, these get represented in a very coarse-grained way; things that are near tend conversely to have many possible responses and thus get represented in finer detail.
"Distance" is used here in a deliberately abstract way because that's how your brain handles it: for the purpose of adaptive allocation of attention, it doesn't matter whether something is spatially, temporally, or socially (etc.) distant -- what matters is how much control you have over it and how confident you can be in making decisions about it. The flipside to this is that because all these various types of distance tend to correlate, they also tend to co-activate one another (PDF): based on a number of empirical results reviewed in the linked article, the authors and others have posited that the brain has distinct systems for dealing with "near" (densely represented) vs. "far" (sparsely represented) things, and generate a number of testable hypotheses based on this. (This reminds me of magnocellular vs. parvocellular subsystems in visual processing and makes me think there might be similar principles at work in other kinds of cognition.)
* * * * *"Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Friendship"(1841)
If hypocrisy means sifting reality with an overly coarse mesh, what controls the granularity? Here the history of the term is enlightening: it grew out of participation in a shared social illusion. Hypocrisy is driven by projection of an image, both to one's self and others. As Robin Hanson elegantly describes it in what is, for my money, the most enlightening post ever on OB:
A non-social mind, caring only about good personal decisions, would want consistency between near and far thoughts. To be consistent, estimates made by sparse approaches should equal the average of estimates made when both sparse and detail approaches contribute. A social mind would also want such consistency when sparse and detail tasks had the same tradeoffs between decisions and images. But when these tradeoffs differ, inconsistency can be more attractive.
The important interaction between these two key tradeoffs is this: near versus far seems to correlate reasonably well with when good decisions matter more, relative to good images. Decision consequences matter less for hypothetical, fictional, and low probability events. Social image matters more, relative to decision consequences, for opinions about what I should do in the distant future, or for what they or "we" should do now. Others care more about my basic goals than about how exactly I achieve them, and they care especially about my attitudes toward those people. Also, widely shared topics are better places to demonstrate mental abilities.
Thus a good cheap heuristic seems to be that image matters more for "far" thoughts, relative to decisions mattering more for "near" thoughts. And so it makes sense for social minds to allow inconsistencies between near and far thinking systems. Instead of having both systems produce the same average estimates, it can make sense for sparse estimates to better achieve a good image, while detail estimates better achieve good decisions.
Cashing out some of the implications has thus far been a very illuminating exercise for me. As Robin points out in another post, many psychological biases such as attribution bias fall out of it as special cases. I would also add availability bias -- the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of richly represented possibilities. It also gels nicely with Vico's dictum that the less we comprehend, the more we project ourselves -- or in more modern language, the less data we have the more we fill the gaps with our own expectations.
What this has to do with hypocrisy, as Robin points out, is that we tolerate hypocrisy because it has fitness value: we don't tend to notice inconsistencies between the coarse vs. fine representations we use when we're projecting an image vs. actually making decisions, because the dissonance would compromise our ability to maintain this discrepancy -- which exists in the first place because of the fitness trade-off between private decisions and public personas. The lower the definition of the image we're considering, the more elbow room our brains have to tacitly fill in the details with what we'd like to be there rather than what's probably actually there. Consequently, if we want to avoid hypocrisy our uses of far-think need to be disciplined and we should take a good, long look at how to keep our personas from falling out of sync with our decisions. (This will be a dominant theme for me for some time to come.)
* * * * *
"As desire recedes, the world becomes clear, pale, and empty."
-- Mason Cooley
As a first step here, Paul Graham's latest expresses a thought that's not only consumed me for the last several months but also uses almost the exact same metaphor I've been thinking about it in terms of -- "emptying myself". He talks about keeping yourself empty in terms of not identifying with specific beliefs, but it's a general principle: in order to be open to novelty -- that is, to be able to adapt instead of getting hung up on things -- you need to have room for it in your life. Graham likely didn't have avoiding hypocrisy in mind when he wrote the short essay, but it has that upshot as well.
This is the light in which the perplexed might do well view my periodic notes-to-nobody that "I" am already a cipher -- the X that needs to be there to make the equations balance, the node required in the syntactical parsing tree to make first-person statements grammatical. Stendhal is supposed to have said somewhere that " mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness", and if this is so then it's due to math's emptiness: its meaninglessness is the other side of its precision; being empty, it contains nothing to fudge.
Humans have it harder: we have to live in the lively middle zone between the concrete and the abstract, and if there can be said to be a universal intellectual problem it's how to bring these two modes into phase and keep them from drifting into discord. There are no universal strong solutions to this problem, but seeing it more clearly can point the way toward some local, partial ones. This is an underwhelming ending to an unconscionably long post, but in the words of Russell: "the world really is rather puzzling and I cannot help it."
But when you break the word down to its components things get a little weird: hypo- means "under" and the root word krinein's unvarnished meaning is "to sift", which by progressive metaphorical polishing becomes "to separate, to distinguish, to discriminate, to select, to judge, to decide" (whence a critic as one who exhibits refined discrimination and a crisis as the moment of judgment). The usual etymologies given for the total word strike me as convoluted and being less consistent with other uses of hypo- than the straightforward one: hypocrisy is the state of being under-critical, as when one is wrapped up in a play and suspending one's disbelief. By symmetry, we might say that being over-critical is hypercrisy, which, tellingly, isn't in the dictionary.
An accusation of hypocrisy, then, can be seen as an accusation of sifting some sphere of reality with too coarse a mesh -- applying an abstract standard which we don't cleave to in our own actions -- in the service of keeping up appearances.
* * * * *"The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light."
-- Matthew 6:22 (KJV)
Brains order sensations into a perceptual field that functions as a stand-in -- that is, a representation -- of an environment, which is then filtered through aptic structures to select an appropriate behavior from a vast set of potentialities. If representation is the inferential bridge between stimulus and response, then the richness of the representation will be proportional to the variety of possible responses and the expected value of picking the right one -- because dense representations take more resources to generate than sparse ones.
We receive signals through noisy channels, which means they decay with distance -- atmosphere scatters light, past performance doesn't guarantee future returns, information mutates as it gets passed from person to person, etc. This creates uncertainty about distant things, but that's not so bad because the number of things we could potentially do about things also tends to decrease as a function of distance in any case. Since there tend to be a relatively small number of behaviors appropriate to things that are distant, these get represented in a very coarse-grained way; things that are near tend conversely to have many possible responses and thus get represented in finer detail.
"Distance" is used here in a deliberately abstract way because that's how your brain handles it: for the purpose of adaptive allocation of attention, it doesn't matter whether something is spatially, temporally, or socially (etc.) distant -- what matters is how much control you have over it and how confident you can be in making decisions about it. The flipside to this is that because all these various types of distance tend to correlate, they also tend to co-activate one another (PDF): based on a number of empirical results reviewed in the linked article, the authors and others have posited that the brain has distinct systems for dealing with "near" (densely represented) vs. "far" (sparsely represented) things, and generate a number of testable hypotheses based on this. (This reminds me of magnocellular vs. parvocellular subsystems in visual processing and makes me think there might be similar principles at work in other kinds of cognition.)
* * * * *"Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Friendship"(1841)
If hypocrisy means sifting reality with an overly coarse mesh, what controls the granularity? Here the history of the term is enlightening: it grew out of participation in a shared social illusion. Hypocrisy is driven by projection of an image, both to one's self and others. As Robin Hanson elegantly describes it in what is, for my money, the most enlightening post ever on OB:
A non-social mind, caring only about good personal decisions, would want consistency between near and far thoughts. To be consistent, estimates made by sparse approaches should equal the average of estimates made when both sparse and detail approaches contribute. A social mind would also want such consistency when sparse and detail tasks had the same tradeoffs between decisions and images. But when these tradeoffs differ, inconsistency can be more attractive.
The important interaction between these two key tradeoffs is this: near versus far seems to correlate reasonably well with when good decisions matter more, relative to good images. Decision consequences matter less for hypothetical, fictional, and low probability events. Social image matters more, relative to decision consequences, for opinions about what I should do in the distant future, or for what they or "we" should do now. Others care more about my basic goals than about how exactly I achieve them, and they care especially about my attitudes toward those people. Also, widely shared topics are better places to demonstrate mental abilities.
Thus a good cheap heuristic seems to be that image matters more for "far" thoughts, relative to decisions mattering more for "near" thoughts. And so it makes sense for social minds to allow inconsistencies between near and far thinking systems. Instead of having both systems produce the same average estimates, it can make sense for sparse estimates to better achieve a good image, while detail estimates better achieve good decisions.
Cashing out some of the implications has thus far been a very illuminating exercise for me. As Robin points out in another post, many psychological biases such as attribution bias fall out of it as special cases. I would also add availability bias -- the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of richly represented possibilities. It also gels nicely with Vico's dictum that the less we comprehend, the more we project ourselves -- or in more modern language, the less data we have the more we fill the gaps with our own expectations.
What this has to do with hypocrisy, as Robin points out, is that we tolerate hypocrisy because it has fitness value: we don't tend to notice inconsistencies between the coarse vs. fine representations we use when we're projecting an image vs. actually making decisions, because the dissonance would compromise our ability to maintain this discrepancy -- which exists in the first place because of the fitness trade-off between private decisions and public personas. The lower the definition of the image we're considering, the more elbow room our brains have to tacitly fill in the details with what we'd like to be there rather than what's probably actually there. Consequently, if we want to avoid hypocrisy our uses of far-think need to be disciplined and we should take a good, long look at how to keep our personas from falling out of sync with our decisions. (This will be a dominant theme for me for some time to come.)
* * * * *
"As desire recedes, the world becomes clear, pale, and empty."
-- Mason Cooley
As a first step here, Paul Graham's latest expresses a thought that's not only consumed me for the last several months but also uses almost the exact same metaphor I've been thinking about it in terms of -- "emptying myself". He talks about keeping yourself empty in terms of not identifying with specific beliefs, but it's a general principle: in order to be open to novelty -- that is, to be able to adapt instead of getting hung up on things -- you need to have room for it in your life. Graham likely didn't have avoiding hypocrisy in mind when he wrote the short essay, but it has that upshot as well.
This is the light in which the perplexed might do well view my periodic notes-to-nobody that "I" am already a cipher -- the X that needs to be there to make the equations balance, the node required in the syntactical parsing tree to make first-person statements grammatical. Stendhal is supposed to have said somewhere that " mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness", and if this is so then it's due to math's emptiness: its meaninglessness is the other side of its precision; being empty, it contains nothing to fudge.
Humans have it harder: we have to live in the lively middle zone between the concrete and the abstract, and if there can be said to be a universal intellectual problem it's how to bring these two modes into phase and keep them from drifting into discord. There are no universal strong solutions to this problem, but seeing it more clearly can point the way toward some local, partial ones. This is an underwhelming ending to an unconscionably long post, but in the words of Russell: "the world really is rather puzzling and I cannot help it."