Extended shower thought: Fish would be bad swimming instructors

Obligatory epistemic status: Speculative and hard to test but falls out an as implication under current worldmodel.

Just a shower thought I've had on my mind for a while:

Fish would be bad swimming instructors (for humans).

This remains true even after adjusting for/overcoming the differences in body types and ability to speak your language.

What do I mean? Well, to be sure, fish are good at swimming. And normally, that's what's you want in a swimming instructor...

...but not here. While fish are good at swimming, they have always been good at swimming. They were deft swimmers before they reached any point of being able to reflect on their selves or what they are doing. They have no appreciation for what it's like not to be a good swimmer.

What does "learning swimming" involve (for humans)?

Fish, being fish, never had to make the transition from being a natural biped to one that has repurposed its body for motion in water, which is what humans have to go through to "learn swimming". They never had to start from a mentality that finds walking somewhat natural -- and swimming somewhat unnatural -- and then adjusts its appendage motion in a way more suited to the latter.

We can imagine any kind of instruction session between fish and humans (as above, appropriately adjusted for language) to be fraught with peril. The fish might try to point out deficiencies that hold back the human. But it has never had to think about such deficiencies, because it has never needed to distinguish between the right way and the wrong way.  It was always just "the way" that came instinctually.

The fish might nearly lash out, frustrated that the human attempts an obviously ineffective means of water locomotion. But it has no idea why those flawed attempts are wrong. They just feel wrong.

The fish will happily demonstrate the "right way", just by doing it. But identifying the difference between its "right way" and "what humans do" would be a learning experience in itself, something it has no natural advantage in, as it was never part of the fish's "learning process for swimming".

The converse is true -- humans would be bad at teaching fish to walk (with the appropriate apparatus) or otherwise move on land. (But note the parallel isn't perfect as humans generally do have to struggle and learn how to walk, but not in any way that involves formal instruction.)

Implications for human-human interaction

So far, this insight feels (and, well, is) just idle speculation. But there are implications for ordinary life.

There will be times when someone is a "natural" at some skill. They're good at it. And that is their only teaching qualification. And they try to teach a non-natural that skill. They are then bad at teaching. The missing piece is the learner's mind is very different from what the natural is capable of filling in. Such a teacher will constantly show them how to do it "right" but not be able to identify the difference between what they're doing and what the learner is -- except by drawing on some kind of unrelated, general intelligence.

(I won't give any specific examples of such a skill, because those become contentious issues in their own right and detract from the general point. But I've definitely been on both sides -- learning from someone who has no understanding why they're good at it, and grasping to communicate something I do without ever thinking about it.)

You can also run into this problem when you become skilled at something. You can sometimes assimilate the skill so well that you are effectively a natural, by forgetting the whole process by which you learned it. You may lose the perspective you had as a beginner and are no longer able to relate to them.

Part of why I enjoy teaching what I know is that I seem unusually resistant to this process, and have vivid memories of the hurdles I overcame as a newbie.

The Scylla-Charybdis Heuristic: if more X is good, why not infinite X?

(Charybdis = care-ib-dis)

A Scott Alexander post really resonated with me, when he talked about one "development milestone" (#4): the ability to understand and speak in terms of tradeoffs, rather than stubbornly try to insist that there are no downsides to your preferred course of action. Such "development milestones" indicate a certain maturity of one's thought process, and greatly change how you discuss ideas.

When a Hacker News discussed Alexander's post, I remembered that I had since started checking for this milestone whenever I engaged with someone's advocacy. I named my spot-check the "Scylla-Charybdis Heuristic", from the metaphor of having to steer between two dangers, either of which have their downsides. There are several ways to phrase the core idea (beyond the one in the title):

Any model that implies X is too low should also be capable of detecting when X is too high.

Or, from the metaphor,

Don't steer further from Scylla unless you know where -- and how bad -- Charybdis is.

It is, in my opinion, a remarkably powerful challenge to whether you are thinking about an issue correctly: are you modeling the downsides of this course of action? Would you be capable of noticing them? Does your worldview have a method for weighing advantages against downsides? (Note: that's not just utilitarian cost/benefit analysis ups and downs, but relative moral weight of doing one bad thing vs another.) And it neatly extends to any issue:

- If raising the minimum wage to $15/hour is a good idea, why not $100?

- If lifting restrictions on immigration is good, why not allow the entire Chinese army to cross the border?

- If there's nothing wrong with ever-increased punishments for convicts, why not the death penalty for everything?

One indicator that you have not reached the "tradeoff milestone" is that you will focus on the absurdity of the counter-proposal, or how you didn't advocate for it: "Hey, no one's advocating that." "That's not what we're talking about." "Well, that just seems so extreme." (Extra penalty points for calling such a challenge a "straw man".)

On the other hand, if you have reached this milestone, then your response will look more like, "Well, any time you increase X, you also end up increasing Y. That Y has the effect/implication of Z. With enough Z, the supposed benefits of X disappear. I advocate that X be moved to 3.6 because it's enough to help with Q, but not so much that it forces the effects of Z." (I emphasize again that this method does not assume a material, utilitarian, "tally up the costs" approach; all of those "effects" can include "violates moral code" type effects that don't directly correspond to a material cost.)

I've been surprised to catch some very intelligent, respected speakers failing this on their core

What about you? Do you make it a habit to identify the tradeoffs of the decisions you make? Do you recognize the costs and downsides of the policies you advocate? Do you have a mechanism for weighing the ups and downs?

Why would a Serious Thinker(tm) fear my comments?

Gene Callahan now has the cute slogan on his blog: "Silas-free for over eight twelve days":



I had submitted thoughtful criticisms to his blog more recently than that, alerting him of errors he's making, and of phenomena he might not be aware of. (Example saved from before then.) So why would this Serious Thinker feel the need to reject, on sight, my comments from appearing, and then advertise it?

A self-serving reason I might give is "Well, Callahan actually not a very good thinker and only gets validation from a clique that already agrees with him, so he can't bear to see remarks that might cause him to question his worldview." But I'm far too biased to make such a judgment.

Instead I invite readers to judge for themselves how Deep and Serious a thinker Callahan is by looking at the link above. He uses the example of a monk who can't explain why a prohibition on touching women exists as a characteristic example of how some things can only be learned from experience.

(It looks to me like maybe Callahan just isn't very good at explaining, and doesn't have much of an incentive to change that. After all, that would undermine his worldview that requires knowledge to be mostly inarticulable, not to mention the aura of unquestionable expertise he tries to maintain.)

As you might expect, he justifies the Silas-free-ness by reference to the "many sites I've been banned from" for my unhelpful comments. True -- I have been banned from many sites for that reason -- it's just that they've all been controlled by him! Information cascade, anyone?