6 ms·

Strong agree. It's the finding of symmetries and folds along non-obvious crease lines, but in semantic space of language <3 It's akin to the amino acid interac

by patcon 6d ago

Strong agree. It's the finding of symmetries and folds along non-obvious crease lines, but in semantic space of language <3 It's akin to the amino acid interactions in proteins that hold biological matter together, and determine it's shape and active form. Protein folding and narrative/storytelling have strange homology :) (I work in this area via collective intelligence, and these ideas are very dear to me during the past decade. It's neat to see the intuitions seemingly becoming validated in language models)

gilleain 6d ago
> Protein folding and narrative/storytelling have strange homology Hmmmmmm. While I get what you mean, and I don't disagree, please be cautious when making analogies between biological systems and more distant fields. Yes, folding is driven by hydrophobic collapse due to interactions between residue sidechains. Really, though, we are just describing two 'complex systems', where large numbers of diverse interactions between elements leads to diverse and emergent structures.
- tony_cannistra 6d ago
  What is your rationale for advocating for caution here?
  - z3c0 6d ago
    I expect because it's overly reductive to the point of falsehood. Two sufficiently complex systems will likely exhibit enough parallels to form a useful analogy, but that does nothing to reflect the ways the systems aren't alike.
  - Jtsummers 6d ago
    Analogies are like models, some are useful, but they're all wrong. Just because we can analogize between protein folding and narrative/storytelling doesn't mean that we can derive anything particularly useful about one from the other except maybe to give an intuition about complexity. The mechanisms and math behind protein folding and an analogy between that and storytelling doesn't necessarily give us any mechanism for or deep understanding into storytelling.
    - dofm 6d ago
      Yes — I get unreasonably upset when people nitpick holes in good analogies as if it is evidence of intellectual weaknrss, rather than working with and around them or suggesting overlapping analogies that address those limitations. And the hole in the analogy may even be the most valuable thing about it. The fact of a hole in an analogy is not in itself information. Of course there's a hole.
      - jt2190 6d ago
        The video is about congnition specifically, and not necessarily about communicating with analogies. > I get unreasonably upset when people nitpick holes in good analogies… What you’re describing is exactly why I strongly recommend avoiding analogy when communicating: Don’t tell me what a thing is like, tell me what the thing is. This forces really thinking about how to describe the thing precisely and succinctly. (Edit: The listener will make their own analogy.)
        dofm 6d ago
        On the contrary, analogy is absolutely a foundational communication technique. But you do have to choose an analogy that your listener does not need to consider first. They need to know the subject of the analogy without having to question your description of it.
    - zmgsabst 6d ago
      You would conclude that storytelling is higher structures of some base unit, perhaps a few layers deep when considering features, eg: narrative -> trope + theme -> memes
      - Jtsummers 6d ago
        > You would conclude that storytelling is higher structures of some base unit I'd be very surprised to meet someone who learned that lesson by comparing protein folding (suggesting a high level of intelligence and probably education in order to understand) to storytelling, rather than having learned that stories are made up of parts in grade school or as a child just hearing, reading, thinking about, and making stories.
  - gilleain 6d ago
    It's a fair question - my concern is 'shallow' analogies. I can best describe this with an anecdote paraphrased from memory from one of Hofstadter's books. He described a piece of AI research (in the 60s?) where they set up a rule system - like Prolog or similar - with the mapping 'sun <-> nucleus' and 'planet <-> electron'. Then they ran the rule engine and lo! produced an analogy between the solar system and atoms. Now this is a shallow analogy, as there is only a very weak correspondence between atoms and planetary systems. Electrons do not actually orbit in the same plane, but in more complex 'orbitals', and they are better described as probability clouds anyway. So while yes there is a _homology_ (I re-read the parent and realised they used homology instead of analogy) between these two systems, it does not tell us much. Is there some mapping between how water molecules scaffold the folding process and storytelling? Does narrative structure tell us anything about local minima in the folding surface? I doubt it. I do not want to be too harsh here - reasoning through analogy is fun and can be useful, it is just limited in what it can do, especially the further apart the systems are.
    - patcon 5d ago
      You've made me realize much of the value is in trying to port tools and methods from one domain into another. It's that when you realize the analogs across domains on either side of a good metaphor, you realize how investigations in one domain (perhaps with more obvious data to collect, or more obvious value in analysis) can be run in the other domain, and sometimes generate non-obvious value.

by patcon 6d ago

gilleain 6d ago

> Protein folding and narrative/storytelling have strange homology Hmmmmmm. While I get what you mean, and I don't disagree, please be cautious when making analogies between biological systems and more distant fields. Yes, folding is driven by hydrophobic collapse due to interactions between residue sidechains. Really, though, we are just describing two 'complex systems', where large numbers of diverse interactions between elements leads to diverse and emergent structures.

tony_cannistra 6d ago
What is your rationale for advocating for caution here?
- z3c0 6d ago
  I expect because it's overly reductive to the point of falsehood. Two sufficiently complex systems will likely exhibit enough parallels to form a useful analogy, but that does nothing to reflect the ways the systems aren't alike.
- Jtsummers 6d ago
  Analogies are like models, some are useful, but they're all wrong. Just because we can analogize between protein folding and narrative/storytelling doesn't mean that we can derive anything particularly useful about one from the other except maybe to give an intuition about complexity. The mechanisms and math behind protein folding and an analogy between that and storytelling doesn't necessarily give us any mechanism for or deep understanding into storytelling.
  - dofm 6d ago
    Yes — I get unreasonably upset when people nitpick holes in good analogies as if it is evidence of intellectual weaknrss, rather than working with and around them or suggesting overlapping analogies that address those limitations. And the hole in the analogy may even be the most valuable thing about it. The fact of a hole in an analogy is not in itself information. Of course there's a hole.
    - jt2190 6d ago
      The video is about congnition specifically, and not necessarily about communicating with analogies. > I get unreasonably upset when people nitpick holes in good analogies… What you’re describing is exactly why I strongly recommend avoiding analogy when communicating: Don’t tell me what a thing is like, tell me what the thing is. This forces really thinking about how to describe the thing precisely and succinctly. (Edit: The listener will make their own analogy.)
      - dofm 6d ago
        On the contrary, analogy is absolutely a foundational communication technique. But you do have to choose an analogy that your listener does not need to consider first. They need to know the subject of the analogy without having to question your description of it.
  - zmgsabst 6d ago
    You would conclude that storytelling is higher structures of some base unit, perhaps a few layers deep when considering features, eg: narrative -> trope + theme -> memes
    - Jtsummers 6d ago
      > You would conclude that storytelling is higher structures of some base unit I'd be very surprised to meet someone who learned that lesson by comparing protein folding (suggesting a high level of intelligence and probably education in order to understand) to storytelling, rather than having learned that stories are made up of parts in grade school or as a child just hearing, reading, thinking about, and making stories.
- gilleain 6d ago
  It's a fair question - my concern is 'shallow' analogies. I can best describe this with an anecdote paraphrased from memory from one of Hofstadter's books. He described a piece of AI research (in the 60s?) where they set up a rule system - like Prolog or similar - with the mapping 'sun <-> nucleus' and 'planet <-> electron'. Then they ran the rule engine and lo! produced an analogy between the solar system and atoms. Now this is a shallow analogy, as there is only a very weak correspondence between atoms and planetary systems. Electrons do not actually orbit in the same plane, but in more complex 'orbitals', and they are better described as probability clouds anyway. So while yes there is a _homology_ (I re-read the parent and realised they used homology instead of analogy) between these two systems, it does not tell us much. Is there some mapping between how water molecules scaffold the folding process and storytelling? Does narrative structure tell us anything about local minima in the folding surface? I doubt it. I do not want to be too harsh here - reasoning through analogy is fun and can be useful, it is just limited in what it can do, especially the further apart the systems are.
  - patcon 5d ago
    You've made me realize much of the value is in trying to port tools and methods from one domain into another. It's that when you realize the analogs across domains on either side of a good metaphor, you realize how investigations in one domain (perhaps with more obvious data to collect, or more obvious value in analysis) can be run in the other domain, and sometimes generate non-obvious value.