'Why' and 'How' are More Important than 'What'

Disclaimer: I apologize if this post seems to be a bit off the blog topic.  I'm a big believer in the philosophy that nothing is simple, and in order to understand how something works, you often need to break it down into much more basic parts.  As such, this particular post may not be your cup of tea.  I've attempted to bring it more in line with the actual topic by jumping back into the original discussion of art, although I know there are likely to be several people reading this who disagree with me when I say that art is purely communicative.  And that's fine; I'm not here to debate on that.

I'm a bit worried that my last post came off as somewhat relativistic, so it seemed proper to go into a bit more detail about just what I was hinting at in the last section.  In the interest of being as clear as possible, I'll state that I do believe in very objective definitions of communication, art, and the qualitative judgement of both.  If you're looking for someone to champion an interpretative worldview, you've unfortunately come to the wrong blog.

However, I do stand behind what I said a few weeks ago; labeling communication as either 'good' or 'bad' is often counterproductive.  The problem revolves around creating definitions rather than goals.

I find that asking "what is," is the wrong way to go about solving a problem because the only possible conclusion for you to draw is a definition and definitions are inherently meaningless outside of social context.

This isn't to say that defining and categorizing information is unnecessary or useless.  If we didn't have shared pools of knowledge, we couldn't interact with each other (an extremely useful practice), but creating categories of information is less useful when we apply these categories to patterns of thought or use them to draw conclusions about the world around us.

Definitions come with baggage.  Let's talk about art again.  'Art' is a contested definition; there are lots of different people with different ideas, and all of them disagree about what exactly art is.  And because definitions are arbitrarily created and maintained, it's difficult to claim one side is right and the other is wrong.

On top of this, we have to accommodate for  'extra' contexts that people have included.  Such as 'art is good'.  Or, 'good people (or correct people) should enjoy art'.  So when we define art (which we must do for us to have a rational discussion on it), we're sucked into a model that is forced to accommodate views that may not be compatible with the actual definition we've created.

When we ask, "What makes a good book", we must deal with the people that disagree with our views and inferences.  Twilight may be an objectively poor-written book, but it certainly sold well enough.  Does our model on 'good writing' accommodate that?  And if it doesn't, can we really make arguments based on that model?

It's impossible to form arguments when you only use definitions, because a definition is just a shared context for information.  If you're not working with the same context as another person, the only conclusion you can draw is... that you're not working with the same context as that person.

On the other hand, if you stop going into a learning opportunity with the assumption of "how do I categorize this information" and start applying a more functional thought process, all of these problems go away.

A much more useful question than "What is this?" is either "Why is this?" or, "How can I?"

Look at the previous comic.  If we approached this from the standpoint of, "What makes a good Youtube video"' our model likely wouldn't be able to accommodate for the situation.  We'd leave ourselves scratching our heads and claiming that the public opinion is unknowable, or that good and bad are relative, and once we realized we couldn't form a model, we'd start to claim that no evaluation could ever be accurate.

But suppose we didn't tackle it from that angle.  Suppose instead of asking "What is the definition of good media?", we simply asked, "Why is there a demographic that dislikes this?"  Our model is accurate.  We don't have to worry about satisfying every case.  We can draw an accurate, objective conclusion, and use it make media that now appeals to a new demographic.  Everybody wins.

Let me try and bring this back into the context of the previous post.  I stated that "We don't write, or paint, or talk because these are inherently noble actions; there's always an alternative motive we're working towards. "  The same principle is at work here.

Creating definitions for their own sake is meaningless, and in the same way, creating 'good' communication for communication's sake is just as silly.  You need to have some reason to do what you do.  Don't go into a subject saying "I shall now learn this subject."  Figure out what the point is, and rely on that.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has an interesting viewpoint on all of this that you may find yourself either agreeing or disagreeing with.  He argues that the pursuit of truth in general is fueled by an external desire other than truth itself.  In other words, the best critical thinkers are those who value truth only as a way to get a better goal.  On the LessWrong wiki, he wrote that, "Historically speaking, the way humanity finally left the trap of authority and began paying attention to, y'know, the actual sky, was that beliefs based on experiment turned out to be much more useful than beliefs based on authority."

It's a bit more blunt than what I was going for, but the thought process is similar.  Don't imbue an amoral action with 'correctness.'  In more practical terms, don't do art for art's own sake, don't communicate for communication's sake, don't study for a subject's sake.  These are all means to an end.  Communication especially.

Find out what your goal is and exploit the world to reach it.  You can explain what you observe.  You can manipulate what you observe to serve your own goals.  Very rarely will you be able to completely describe what you observe, and it will be even more rare for you to be able to completely and coherently spread that definition into a singular word.

I'll probably have more to say on this in the future, but this is a good groundwork.  Now we can talk more about communication itself!