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+1 to "a chunk can have multiple words in it"
related thoughts:
- once a phrase becomes memetic enough it can sorta become one chunk all together? like I think "yes in my backyard" is now p much one chunk for people familiar with it - it's a pretty complex chunk if you were to parse it out (and relies on additional context that's not actually in those words), but people can slot it into their working memory thoughts without pulling up all of that complexity every time
- though, in the process of a slogan becoming a single chunk it probably also gets simplified and overlaid with valence & connotations that are not the same person to person
- so I guess there's an additional steering-step where you can - influence how exactly a given concept gets chunked into people's heads (this is a thing political pundits do?)
- additionally, things take up less working memory if they are mnemonic in some way, like rhyming or being a song. I am not sure how to translate this into "numbers of chunks" - a song is definitely not all one chunk bc you can partially know a song, even a line of a song is not all one chunk bc you can know part of a line, maybe songness ups the number of chunks you can learn?
- then there's also factors like things being easier to parse and remember if they are simpler, less surprising, more internally coherent. less inferential distance from what you already know, but also e.g. if it's a song it's easier if the music "fits" the words; it's easier to remember a five-word sentence than five random words. this also seems hard to translate to the "number of chunks" model but it does matter
- (I keep meaning to write up the example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mury_(song) which I think I've told you about - in which a popular Catalan protest song that was originally straightforwardly about overthrowing oppressors was adapted to Polish in a version that also warned against appropriating anti-oppression rhetoric to do new oppression, and then that Polish version was adopted by Polish protestors with the warning bit basically skipped, to the frustration of the author. seems relevant here)
1
You Get About Five Words seems to be among my most-cited posts (although credit for the idea actually goes to Catherine Olsson).
Back when it went through the Annual Review, @DanielFilan left a review noting that the post is erring on the side of "simplistic poetry", at the expense of actually giving good models for "Why '5 words' as opposed to '10'?", and whether this kicks in at hundreds or thousands of people or what.
I've had a TODO of someday researching working memory and memetics and writing up a better post. I haven't gotten around to it. But, here is a short summary of the concepts I believe, followed by the back-and-forth with Daniel.
People have about 5 working memory slots ("chunks")
I'm much less confident about the exact mechanism than the empirical takeaway. But, my guess is: in the limit, the amount of words you get is "the number of words that people can fit into their working memory slots."
(Or, more confidently: "The number of words you get is what people can fit into one block of their attention." Where, "working memory" is a more specific hypothesis about how attention is operationalized)
People have about 5 working memory slots. Research seems a bit unclear, reports vary from 4 - 7 last I checked. So, when people are not particularly motivated to listen, or preserve your nuance, you get the amount of bandwidth that one fleeting moment of attention provides.
A "chunk" is not exactly the same thing as "a word", but, I think for purposes of communication, they are pretty much identical. (Chunks don't have to be words, when you are thinking on your own. But they basically have to be words when communicating to other people).
Worse, it matters not just that people parse your initial idea when they aren't motivated, but they have to remember it, and then pass it on to others. When people further spread your idea, it's often the number of slots available when people are trying to combine your concept with other concepts. If you spent 5-7 words, but someone wants to take your idea and combine in with their own idea, they might compress it down to 2-3 words.
(i.e. you might say "ML-based superintelligence would kill everyone", and people compress it to "AI will kill us" or just "AI doom")
You can spend your 5 words on motivating people to learn more
Some commenters complained I was underselling how possible it was to teach more complex concepts.
I think this rule applies when you are communicating to people who are not (initially) motivated to put in effort to understand you, or preserve your nuance. But, you can sometimes spend your 5 words on "motivate people motivated to look up more words."
Hence, clickbait headlines.
"Read the Bible, it'll change your life" is 7 words, but it can successfully get more words across in some cases.
Discussion
Daniel Filan's initial Review (link)
Raemon
The aspiring-rigorous-next-post I hope to write someday is called "The Working Memory Hypothesis", laying out more concretely that at some maximum scale, your coordination-complexity is bottlenecked on a single working-memory-cluster, which (AFAICT based on experience and working memory research) amounts to 3-7 chunks of concepts that people already are familiar with.
So, I am fairly confident that in the limit it is actually about 5 words +/- 2, because Working Memory Science and some observations about what slogans propagate. (But, am much less sure about how fast the limit approaches and what happens along the way)
Daniel
Aren't working memory chunks much bigger than one word each, at least potentially?
Raemon
I think if you end up having a chunk that you use repeatedly and need to communicate about, it ends up turning into a word.
(like, chunks are flexible, but so are words)
Daniel
To me, this suggests a major change to the message of the post. Reading it, I'd think that I have five samples from the bank of existing words, but if the constraint is just that I have five concepts that can eventually be turned into words, that's a much looser constraint!
Raemon
Not 100% sure I understand the point, but for concepts-you-can-communicate, I think you are bottlenecked on already-popular-words.
Chunks and words don't map perfectly. But... word-space is probably mostly a subset of chunk-space?
I think wordless chunks matter for intellectual progress, where an individual thinker might have juuuust reached the point where they've distilled a concept in their head down into a single chunk, so they can then reason about how that fits with other concepts. But, if they want to communicate about that concept, they'll need to somehow turn it into words.
Daniel
Is the claim that before I learn some new thing, each of my working memory slots is just a single word that I already know? Because I'm pretty sure that's not true.
Raemon
First: the epistemic status of this whole convo is "thing Ray is still thinking through and is not very sure about."[1]
Two, for your specific question: No, my claim is that wordspace is a (mostly) subset of chunkspace, not the other way round. My claim is something like "words are chunks that you've given a name", but you can think in chunks that have not been given names.
Three: I'm not taking that claim literally, I'm just sorta trying it out to see if it fits, and where it fails. I'm guessing it'll fail somewhere but I'm not actually sure where yet. If you can point to a concrete way that it fails to make sense that'd be helpful.
But, insofar as I'm running with this idea:
An inventor who is coming up with a new thing might be working entirely with wordless chunks, that they invent, combine them into bigger ideas, compress into smaller chunks, without ever being verbalized or given word form.
Daniel
If wordspace is a subset of chunkspace and not the other way around, and you have about five chunks, do you agree that you do not have about five words, but rather more?
Raemon
Yes[2], although I've heard mixed things about how many chunks you actually have, and that the number might be more like 4.
Also, the ideas often get propagated in conjunction with other ideas. I.e. people don't just say "politics is the mindkiller", they say "politics is the mindkiller, therefore X" (where X is whatever point they're making in the conversation). And that sentence is bottlenecked on total comprehensibility. So, basically the more chunks you're using up with your core idea, the more you're at the mercy of other people truncating it when they need to fit other ideas in.
I'd argue "politics is the mindkiller" is two chunks initially, because people parse "is" and "the" somewhat intuitively or fill them in. Whereas Avoid Unnecessarily Political Examples is more like 4 chunks. I think you typically need at least 2 chunks to say something meaningful, although maybe not always.
Once something becomes popular it can eventually compress down to 1 chunk. But, also, I think "sentence complexity" is not only bottlenecked on chunks. "Politics is the mindkiller" can be conceptually one chunk, but it still takes a bunch of visual or verbal space up while parsing a sentence that makes it harder to read if it's only one clause in a multi-step argument. I'm not 100% sure if this is secretly still an application of working memory, or if it's a different issue.
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Raemon continues:
Continuing to babble down this thought-trail [about "people inventing concepts" vs "people sharing them]
I'm wondering how Gendlin Focusing interacts with working memory.
I think the first phase of focusing is pre-chunk, as well as pre-verbal. You're noticing a bunch of stuff going on in your body. It's more of a sensation than a thought.
The process of focusing is trying to get those sensations into a form your brain can actually work with and think about.
I... notice that focusing takes basically all my concentration. I think at some part of the process it's using working memory (and basically all of my working memory). But I'm not sure when that is.
One of the things you do in focusing is try to give your felt-sense a bunch of names and see if they fit, and notice the dissonance. I think when this process starts, the felt-sense is not stored in chunk form. I think as I try to give it different names I'm trying to find the right chunk.
Gendlin Focusing might be a process where:
Years later, I don't think I thought through it in much more detail.
I'm not actually sure why I said "yes" here. I think when you're communicating to other people, you only get to communicate via chunks you can easily communicate, and basically for all practical purposes these are words.