The African Enterprise (Thought terminating cliches, Godwin's law, Subsumption Architecture)
Hi friends,
Greeting from Abuja.
Here's what I have to share with you this week:
Our Strong-Features bias: Features, especially strong ones, have been the basic rubric of Identification. Whether in classifying creatures, assessing people, or making product decisions, strong features provide a conceptual framework to ease decision-making.
We use strong features because they're reliable. Until they're not. Like the Black Swan sighting described in Nassim Talab's Black Swan, the problem with relying on strong features is that it forces us to decide, conclude, based on the things we know with little regard for those we don't.
Strong features encourage, force us even, to decide based on preconceived biases. They propagate exclusionary behavior that can cause bad, maybe expensive, decision-making.
So, Why do we have a bias toward strong features? What do we about it?
Coolest things I learned this week
Thought terminating Cliches
There's a thing people do that can be amusing sometimes and was even a meme at one point. When in an argument, as soon as they perceive the other person to be winning, they quickly point out wrong use of grammar or pronunciation as a way to stop the argument from proceeding further. To deftly shift the conversation away from what the other person is saying. This is one example of the use of a thought-terminating cliche.
Thought terminating cliche, also known as thought stopper or bumper sticker logic, is a form of language intended to end an argument. It's a way of ending debate with a cliche rather than a point. This term was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in 1961 when he referred to the them as the language of non-thought.
Examples of these cliches are:
"It is what it is" which is intended to disengage.
"Stop thinking so much" which is intended to shift the focus from the topic or the argument to the person's thought; implying an overuse of thought.
'Let's agree to disagree" which is used to cease discussion. And so on.
While in certain circumstances there is nothing wrong with the use of these thought stoppers, some far-reaching ones are used to restrict debate around a topic (An example is in George Orwell's 1984 where "dangerous words" like freedom do not exist in the totalitarian world).
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Godwin's law
This 1990 law by American attorney and author Mike Godwin is based on the use of the kind of thought-stopping logic described above.
According to Godwin's law, as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of the topic), the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches. It's a way to end an argument with the most distorted, exaggerated, egregious, or even reductive comparison possible.
Of people who throw out this comparison, Godwin wrote, "think a bit harder about the holocaust."
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The grand hierarchy of Intelligence
Rodney brooks championed an approach to robotics called Embodied intelligence. One that is based on biological design. Animals are not formed in one fell swoop. Instead, they evolve. New species slowly emerge over time through a gradual accumulation of functions. Natural selection favors functions that work, the rest are discarded.
In designing brook's robot, the team would start with a simple machine that could do just one function well. For example, if the function is Walk, it walked very well. The limbs would have springs and shock absorbers that allow it to respond to the environment in real-time. With those, it learns and adapts to the environment.
The more it learns, the more it's able to perform higher-level functions. Hence the method is called Subsumption Architecture.
The underlying idea in this approach is the grand hierarchy of intelligence: High-level sophisticated tasks are performed by combining simpler skills that are in turn just organizations of simpler skills.
In essence, Complex skill = Simple skill + Simple Skill + Simple Skill...
And, Simple skill = Simpler Skill + Simpler skill + Simpler Skill ...
That’s it for this week.
If you have any thoughts or questions, hit reply and we can have a chat. And if you enjoyed it, share it with friends.
Till next week,
Kelvin