Politics isn’t about Policy

Few people claim that food is mostly about nutrition or clothes about comfort anywhere NEAR the 1st world margin. Marriage is supposed to be about kids and romance is supposed to be a ritual part of marriage in the claims of the ideologically ‘pure’. I don’t think that there are clear claims about art and what its for.

Otherwise, I strongly endorse that list as largely true and incredibly important to understanding and effecting the world.

It seems pretty clear to me that there are people who want the other statements to be true. What fraction do commenters think such people are in the population? Are any societies run by them to an unusual degree?

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“(What else should go on this list?)”

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Data is not information.

Information is not knowledge.

Knowledge is not wisdom.

(– Clifford Stoll)

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I do like the list, but I doubt this particular topic carries the contrarian bang of the others. It’s unlikely that many people actually see politics the way your civics teacher described it.

I kinda wanna hear the bedroom is not about sleep one.

Justice is not about the victim
Commercials are not about the product

Well, whaddaya expect from a bunch of monkeys? The leader of a tribe didn’t run on specific policies – without language, policies would be hard to explain. The leader of the tribe was selected based on some kind of character, popularity, and fierceness, and the ability to build and maintain coalitions. See _Chimpanzee Politics_ to read about human politics writ small, on the monkey stage.

I think many of the problems with social organization result from the application of monkey methods and monkey brains to very non-monkey problems. Voting for leaders is a perfect example.

To me, the interesting question is: Given this, how do we fix it?

One part of the answer, perhaps, is to move power downwards, so people are making decisions in groups closer to the size of a tribe, so their instincts are more in line with the actual situation. But that’s a pretty weak solution because the world has changed, and it’s a lot bigger now. Ideally we’d find methods that work for the bigger world while appealing to the monkey brain. If anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears. Big, hairy, monkey ears :).

ZM, slogans can’t include all possible qualifiers. I was very clear in the first paragraph that I’m not claiming that Y has no influence on X. On laughter, it seems most is not in response to jokes.

I wrote: “At the very least, it would only take one extra word to say ‘X is not only about Y.'” But for the purposes of transparency, I guess I should note that I myself have been repeatedly thinking lately that “School isn’t about learning!” So maybe I should have been a little bit more moderate in my criticism above! I still think that including qualifiers oftentimes makes matters much more clear–and I don’t think I need to qualify that statement by explicitly noting that I don’t mean all possible qualifiers.

My main point still stands: fakeable signals are fakeable signals of something we care about, or no one would bother.

@TGGP

“Laughter indicates a lack of hostility or serious competition among friends”

Also deference to those higher in the social hierarchy or those you need to impress, as well as a socially unthreatening way to question authority, and restore balance in cases of social tension. Thus the laughter at all the boss’ jokes, the girl who laughs at her date’s “wit,” jay leno, and your friends when you spill wine on them.

@Nominull

“the portability of jokes”

What portability of jokes? You must be going to much different international business dinners than I do.

The entire reason we pay John Cleese a gazillion dollars a keynote is that he’s 1 of about 3 people on the planet who are globally funny. Otherwise you are stuck at the table while the Korean, American, Saudi and Brazilian bank executives are wondering why the heck that Swiss guy is saying that.

Adaptation isn’t about Fitness
Business isn’t about getting things done
(or, Economic Adaptation isn’t about Economic Fitness)
Success isn’t about Rationality

The third one may provide some grist for the OB mill. Rationality is critical to doing anything well, so why is irrationality so widespread?

If you’re a contrarian, then you’re attempting to profit from holding a belief that few others hold. If you’re trying to articulate a world view in public (which you seem to be) then you are trying to persuade others to adopt beliefs which you hold, in which case you are not a contrarian.

You pose an argument about what factors drive behaviour: ‘while Y is the function commonly said to drive most X behavior, in fact some other function Z drives X behavior more’.

Assuming that you succeed in establishing the value of Z, what have you discovered? If you know what drives the election of a candidate to office, and I don’t, does that give you any kind of advantage over me? Does it help you deceive me? Does it protect you if I attempt to deceive you?

If I agree with you in calling a spade a spade, or I choose not to, what difference does it make?

DJs aren’t about finding and playing good music.
Models and particularly supermodels aren’t about beauty.

Most of those considered “beautiful” in the media, the commercial fashion models, aren’t beautiful at all. I’m not talking about people who aren’t ugly but aren’t beautiful either. This is a different class. They’re what I term “borderline beautiful”, or “borderline beauties”; they DO have certain characteristics that truly beautiful people have, often to a great degree, but there’s something wrong. Not unlike the uncanny valley. Just like computer generated people who look human but… they look beautiful, but… Something is amiss. You can tell. The configuration is put together in a slightly wrong way, and the full effect is never achieved. The result is that they’re not beautiful. It’s as if they have muscles but aren’t strong. Like a bomb that is assembled almost right – it never goes off. It seems that the more popular, stronger their borderlineness beauty is.

True, full beauties, those that transfix your gaze and never let go, that overwhelm the pleasure center in the brain, are in an entirely different class. Entirely. They’re very, very regular in appearance. To a degree, boringly so. They share characteristics with very little variance. The sizes, shapes and positions of their characteristics lie within very, very fine tolerances. With true beauties you can’t tell who really is more beautiful because the features you consider beautiful in each one of them exceed your beauty threshold. Whatever the variation, it is beautiful – you can’t argue with it.

Borderline beauties, those that almost enter the domain of beauty but barely miss it, are just frustrating to behold. You can’t derive any pleasure. Even a regular person with one truly beautiful feature among not-so-beautiful features brings more aesthetic pleasure.

It seems that there are more truly beautiful people walking the streets than the catwalk.

Do beautiful people exist in every gene pool? Yes. Do very beautiful? Yes. Do the most beautiful? No. The highest beauty is the most average, and that is found only in a very narrow gene pool. All other gene pools exhibit excesses, having some features that are too far from the average. It’s not a question about culture, or your own gene pool, or what you “prefer”, it’s a question about averageness. Only a few gene pools have achieved the highest averageness. Just like some gene pool has to be at the bottom in terms of beauty, there’s one that has to be at top. Not unlike intelligence.

(Most) DJs don’t play good music. They don’t care about music. They care about appearances. But that’s fine; so does the audience. The music isn’t the point for them. It’s a tool. A commodity.

Your lists of “X is not about Y” statements are a bit like a old guy’s aphorisms on how to live life: they sound like they should be true, but they are often given without justification. I would like to hear justifications.

Sentences that sound true without justification are dangerous. You’d think the people on this blog would know that.

@ Overcoming Laziness: Freedom from bias is generally most useful if you’re making important decisions where the outcome of the decision is more important than what people think when you make it. That’s my understanding, at least.

“Kind of off-topic, but I think someone needs to consider what sort of a life a man would lead if he didn’t have all the biases discussed here. He could probably find work as an engineer, but I’m quite sure he’d never get laid. So are we sure we want to say that a bias is necessarily irrational?”

Yes. The kind of biases talked about here are (almost ?) by definition irrational: inconsistencies in a person’s internal model of the world. If getting laid was a goal, eliminating an irrational bias couldn’t make him less likely to get laid.

Ok, you can always construct horizon-effect scenarios where a little extra insight leads to a worse outcome, but those always seem extremely contrived in the real world. And the cost of eliminating the bias might be so high as to leave no time for getting laid.

Sex isn’t about pleasure.

Rock’n’roll isn’t about music.

Drugs, however, are about the high, at least at first.

applause also precedes human apes (I think to signal group social agreement).
And as far as I know this one is just my strong personal suspicion: I think the popular diagram for romantic hearts (almost always colored red or pink) is the inflamed buttocks of a female ape in heat -hence the expression heart shaped ass.

“I’m amazed how many people read this blog while, apparently, hating the experience and deriving no utility from it. I begin to suspect that Complaints aren’t about Problems.”

I hope that wasn’t in response to my comment, I like to read Overcoming Bias even if it’s often not about overcoming bias. Similarly, I like to eat food even if it’s often not nutritious.

I’m amazed how many people read this blog while, apparently, hating the experience and deriving no utility from it.

Why did Holmes derive utility from his association with Watson? It wasn’t because Watson was good at uncovering the truth.

“Overcoming Bias isn’t about overcoming bias.”

And “Godël, Escher, Bach” isn’t about just these three people.

Is that a bad thing?

“Complaints aren’t about Problems.”

Correction:

Complaints aren’t about solving problems.

That great repository of “wisdom” known as the TV Tropes Wiki explains the phenomenon in detail.

This reminds me of Monty Python:
“This isn’t a proper argument-you’re just being contrary!”
“No, I’m not.”

Some of your contrary statements seem to be true, while others seem to be nonsense that’s merely contrary for its own sake. I think at least one of them misrepresents the common conception it’s claiming to debunk. I rather suspect that the ones that seem true appear so either by accident, or because they align most easily with my own biases.

For example:

-How are bedrooms not about sleep? I can’t speak for everyone, but sleep is one of only a couple of things I do in mine. They may not be completely about sleep, but’s their primary, or at least secondary, function.

-Church, or religion, is (I think) commonly thought of as and instrument of the SEARCH for God, making it at least somewhat about the seeker, even if he’s completely sincere. Even Jesus said that the Sabbath was created for Man and not the other way around. No Christians I know think that God needs them to go to church.

I generally like this blog, but your list of contrary one-liners doesn’t seem that well thought-out.

It’s not about the corollaries. It’s about the application. Your conclusions are far too rigid and are biased themselves in their assumptions. Overcoming bias MUST first begin with recognizing the bias in ourselves. Identifying the bias in others without first having done so in ourselves is nothing more than an exercise in projection. For example, your dismissing of high school elections for class president as “popularity contests”, overlooks all of the students who would aspire to become part of the decision-making process in their schools. You risk sounding like a class president candidate who lost, and summarizes the cruelty of their defeat as a result of “not being popular enough”. In that regard, you can take comfort in the example of Barack Obama. He has become popular without having done anything at all. Please don’t talk to me about him being a “community organizer”. Those are all just popularity contests, anyway.

How about that Business IS about Money? Or it isn’t?

Sounds like General Systemantics:
> What’s in a name
> People performing roles in systems often do not perform the role suggested by the name the system gives that person, nor does the system itself perform the role that its name suggests.
> * People in systems do not actually do what the system says they are doing [Functionary’s Falsity].
> * The system itself does not actually do what it says it is doing. [The Operational Fallacy].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics#What.27s_in_a_name

It’s election day 2016. How about “Voting Isn’t About Facts”.

I paraphrased this from an article recommended on Marginal Revolution entitled “A New Theory for Why Trump Voters Are So Angry — That Actually Make Sense” (here’s the URL https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/08/a-new-theory-for-why-trump-voters-are-so-angry-that-actually-makes-sense/)