https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=spq6SZsk87A
Hello and welcome to Navigating Patterns. What I thought I’d talk about today is this concept behind intelligibility and control. There’s a lot of stuff going on here, I think, and it’s going to take us a little while to piece this apart, I think, and really wrestle with it and understand it. And of course, these are my definitions, and as always, if you like my definitions, feel free to use them. That’s why we’re here. If you don’t like my definitions, that’s okay too. You can throw them out. I’ll never know. Or better yet, modify them for your own use and understanding. So when we’re talking about intelligibility versus control, what are we really on about? Where is this intersection? Where is this line? What are the differences between these two things? And I think the big issue is we don’t think about intelligibility. We tend to frame the world in terms of control. And we usually have very specific ideas of what control actually means, what control we actually have or want or need, what control is being exerted and where. But actually, it turns out that most people don’t actually need control. It’s just not that interesting to them. In a previous video, I talked about conspiracies, everyone’s favorite topic. And in that video, I sort of talked about the fact that you know, you don’t people don’t need control. But what they need is intelligibility. And so we’re talking about intelligibility. What are we really talking about? Well, we’re really talking about the ability to predict. The ability to feel safe because we can predict things. Not that we did, but we can with the potential, the opportunity to predict things. So, for example, if you see a pattern in the world and you go, oh, well, this reliably repeats itself. Right. So I don’t worry about that because it’s following this pattern. And if I ever need, I can jump in, figure out where in the pattern and boom, that’s intelligibility. Or at least a sense of intelligibility. I’m not saying it’s accurate. I’m not saying you’re right. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying when we get that feeling, that’s enough. We know we can’t get deep control over everything. Right. That’s the concept that we can change things to our will, or at least towards our will. And we don’t always have that option. And also, if you do that, or if you try to do that, you run into the problem of responsibility. There’s also more effort involved. And so people prefer actually just to have things intelligible, something that they have a comfort level with. They’ll be able to make a prediction. And so they won’t need to have control. Like now it’s great. And also, hey, what are we really doing when we’re talking about this? Well, there’s this concept. John Vervicki talks about this quite a lot, this concept of distributed cognition. And I like to think of distributed cognition to some extent as outsourced cognition, because when you talk about distributed cognition, it’s sort of like an untrammeled good in the world. But actually, distributed cognition can be bad. And outsourced cognition sort of highlights this. There’s a way in which distributed cognition is always an outsourcing. And so we’re trusting somebody else or something else to do the cognition for us. Could be good. Could be bad. It’s definitely something we have to watch out for, though. And in that way, intelligibility is outsourced cognition. It’s the idea that, well, since we can make predictions on this, we don’t need control because we can just respond. And also, we are taking that control and outsourcing it to the intelligibility. At the same time, we’re going, eh, you take the control. I’ll take the knowing what’s going on. We’ll split the difference. That way, you’re not responsible. If something goes wrong in an intelligible system, you can say, oh, this intelligence system broke down on me. It’s not my fault. Right. We like to do that. Very, very, very good. Hey, oh, it’s not my fault. Right. I’m not to blame. It’s the intelligibility that failed. So that’s a type of outsourcing. Right. We’re outsourcing that control and we’re trusting in it, too. And outsourcing requires trust to some extent. Right. And maybe we misplace that trust. We outsource too much. Right. Or we outsource too little and then we have to take control of the things or at least be more aware of things. The more intelligibility we think something has, the safer it is. Like you can rely on the sun coming up every morning. We don’t even think about it. Do we try to control it? Not really. I mean, you can make some arguments that, well, we try to control the amount of light we get by turning on lights. And yeah, but generally we don’t try to like reproduce the sun or the effects of it or anything crazy. So there’s some intelligibility in the rising and setting the sun. And that gives us the safety that we can understand the world. And if we need to know what time of year it is, we can kind of figure it out from when the sun’s coming up and down. Ah, it’s planting time. It’s not planting time. Right. We don’t need to worry about those things. Or at least the ancients didn’t. And maybe we worry about them too much now. And, you know, maybe we get things more efficient. And maybe that efficiency is dangerous because it breaks down very quickly when it breaks down. So the idea of intelligibility and outsourcing is very powerful. You’re outsourcing that control. And that’s good enough. It’s good enough for a lot of people. So people with say, limited cognitive ability, right, they have to outsource things. They can’t start worrying about every little thing. Like maybe I do. They can go out and say, you know what, I’m not going to worry about that. I’m sure there’s a system behind it somewhere and I’m just going to trust in that system, even if I don’t understand the system. Because it’s intelligible to me that there would be a system. And that’s one way in which we create narratives. True or false. Not making truth claims here. Right. I’m not making good bad claims. I’m just saying this is how we act. Those narratives, we just assume they’re there. They’re good. They’re going to do whatever it is we assume they do. And that’s going to continue in a way that we need it to. Right. And we’re often surprised, right, because there’s too many things and there’s too many narratives and they’re bound to be wrong in significant ways. So I think it’s useful rather than thinking about people are ready and willing to take control and want to have control. You know, it’s better to understand that, you know, maybe they might be happy to outsource. Right. To what’s intelligible. Maybe that makes them happier because there’s less cognitive load. There’s less responsibility. There’s fewer things they have to actually worry about. There’s fewer moving parts for them. It just makes for an easier life. And even when it goes horribly wrong, they’re probably more resilient in some ways because they have more capacity elsewhere to deal with whatever the result of this failure and intelligibility. So that can be very handy. And it’s good to know because it’s sort of puzzling why people who can’t understand a lot of things or can’t understand super complicated things. Well, the video on that too. Why? Why they don’t fall apart like they seem to be fairly resilient, anti-fragile. If you want to use a Nassim Taleb term, which I think is appropriate here, they they they have their resources distributed out a little bit better. And distributing cognition is part of distributing out your resources. They’re not trying to take control. They, you know, and they’re giving you the resources to do that. You know, and they’re giving some stuff up for that control for sure. But maybe that’s more efficient in the long run. All right. It may not seem more efficient in the short run. Maybe it’s more efficient in the long run. So this sort of points to another thing like people who are control freaks or who want control. Maybe they’re more able to track things, right? They have better tracking. They can track more things and see more details. They’re likely to think in terms of control and understanding rather than intelligibility because intelligibility is not understanding. It’s just I think I understand this good enough, right? It’s not true understanding. It’s like, well, this is a close enough approximation. Eh, we’ll just go with this. And if there are errors, we’ll deal with them because we have all these other resources, you know, spread out. Now we’re not focused on these, you know, few important most important things or or getting them right. So an element of control is what I like to what I like to couch is perfectionism and perfectionism is the purity of secularism. That’s what perfectionism is. And that’s important to realize. So this idea of control is very much wrapped up in perfectionism and this idea of understanding is very much wrapped up in perfectionism. Whereas intelligibility is fuzzy enough that it’s good enough and it’s good enough for most people, actually. And we don’t even realize that, especially for control freaks like myself. We don’t have any appreciation at all. How are these people living? How are they surviving with all these poor models of the world? Well, intelligibility is a great standard. It works really well. And that’s the thing. It’s that imprecision. It’s that fuzziness. But that confidence and that trust that allows you the comfort to outsource other things in other ways and to really distribute your resources in a way that makes you very anti-fragile, very able to take hits and to keep going, very able to adjust on the fly. And maybe we don’t give that enough credit. So couching things in terms of control is a deep mistake. A lot of people don’t want control. Control implies responsibility. It takes detail. It takes time, energy and effort. And if you don’t have to spend that time, energy and effort, you can spend it somewhere else. That might be better. You’re giving up something for sure. But maybe you’re not giving up so much that it’s a big burden. And maybe the amount of time, energy and effort you’re spending trying to control something is better spent doing a bunch of other things. And if you’re doing a bunch of things sort of in the middle, instead of trying to do one or two things perfectly, maybe that’s better. Maybe that’s more resilient. Maybe that makes you a better, happier person. Maybe that makes life easier to go through. Maybe it makes those little disasters or even those large disasters more survivable. I’m not stating that as an absolute fact. I’m not making a claim. But I’m trying to get you to consider things. And the whole process of understanding, finding intelligibility and looking for these patterns, trying to navigate these patterns, really is all about that. It’s about having these richer models with what I hope I’m doing is adding a little nuance to the world and the words. And not only the definitions of the words, but how we use the words, what they end up meaning in certain contexts. Because meaning, as we’ve discussed before, meaning pops out from the content, the definition and the context. That’s where the meaning is found. It pops out. So maybe by using these more nuanced approaches, these more nuanced definitions and models, maybe we can navigate the patterns in the world a little bit better. And again, the real goal here is to make things better. We can talk about things with people. We can understand people in a different way. We can relate to them in a different way. We can show them the things we’ve learned, the way we’ve used models, the way we use these definitions, the way we understand these words. And maybe give them a richer understanding or maybe they enhance our understanding because now we can converse. Because now we have a common understanding or a common way of starting to talk about things. You don’t need a common language to talk to people. That can’t possibly be true. You wouldn’t be able to learn a new language by just going to a country. What we do have in common with people is intelligibility, agreement. Those are the things we build the language commonalities off of. That’s what’s important. And that’s what these videos that I’m doing are hopefully helping people to do. And to that end, I hope that you’ll pay attention to these things and take them seriously and really think about them and wrestle with them, struggle with them. That’s how you make an idea your own. You want to be aware of honor and wisdom. And that’s why with all my videos, I try to remember, I try to be mindful to thank you very much for your time and attention.