The Framers and the Framed: Notes On the Slate Star Codex Controversy
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Highlights
- Walter Lippman explained it a century ago: The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.[11]
- Azar Gat made a similar observation more recently: In order to cope with their environment, humans strive to identify, understand, and explain the forces operating within and behind it, so that they can at least predict, and if possible, also manipulate these forces and their effects to their advantage. They are predisposed to assume that such forces are there. With respect both to their natural and human environment, humans achieved impressive successes in using these methods. The quest for an understanding thus evolved into a fundamental human trait. Humans must have answers as to the reasons and direction of the world around them. Stretching this faculty the furthest, humans have a deep emotional need for a comprehensive interpretive framework, or set of interpretive ‘stories’ that would explain, connect the various elements of, and give meaning to their world and their own existence within it. They need a cognitive map of, and a manipulative manual for, the universe, which by lessening the realm of the unknown would them a sense of security and control, allay their fears, and alleviate their pain and distress. [12]
- This is true even for even the most concrete of human experiences: the hunter, logger, and geologist will walk through the same patch of wilderness and see an entirely different forest, for each eye is trained to notice something different. The more abstract the things observed the greater individual variance there will be.
- Reducing an entire movement—the histories, controversies, disagreements, defeats, glories, and quirks of thousands of unique individuals—to one comprehensible frame will always cut important things out. It is inevitable that some members of the covered group will be dissatisfied with the frame they have been forced into.
- To make things clear for the fish: humans have a strong, perhaps even innate, need to tell their own story. This is what makes social media so addicting—it allows you to endlessly curate your own self-image, forever perfecting your personal story for others’ consumption. Losing the ability to tell our own story feels like loss of agency—a violation.