Related to: Bucket errors, Categorizing Has Consequences, Fallacies of Compression

Followup to: Gears in Understanding

I use a lot of fake frameworks — that is, ways of seeing the world that are probably or obviously wrong in some important way.

I think this is an important skill. There are obvious pitfalls, but I think the advantages are more than worth it. In fact, I think the "pitfalls" can even sometimes be epistemically useful.

Here I want to share why. This is for two reasons:

I think fake framework use is a wonderful skill. I want it represented more in rationality in practice. Or, I want to know where I'm missing something, and Less Wrong is a great place for that.
I'm building toward something. This is actually a continuation of Gears in Understanding, although I imagine it won't be at all clear here how. I need a suite of tools in order to describe something. Talking about fake frameworks is a good way to demo tool #2.

With that, let's get started.

There are two kinds of people: extroverts and introverts.

…sort of.

I mean, as I look around, it certainly looks like there's a difference between outgoing social butterflies and quiet types who mostly stay at home. Maybe it's more like a continuum rather than a binary thing. But if so, I find myself wondering if it's bimodal with rough "extrovert" and "introvert" clusters anyway.

But then I look at long lists of differences between extroverts and introverts, and I worry. What exactly do these terms mean? Is it just about how talkative and loud people are? If so, are the labels sneaking in connotations about where people "get energy" from and how action-oriented they are?

Well, it turns out that a bunch of those traits are correlated. The intuition is, in fact, picking up on something true in the world.

But.

That doesn't mean the intuition is correct.

It looks like maybe extraversion isn't bimodal. I can justify that after the fact: the Big Five verified extraversion as a correlational cluster of traits and defines introversion as "low extraversion", and a Gaussian distribution seems like a more sensible prior than a bimodal one. But I didn't think of that ahead of time. If I hadn't thought to look, I might have thought the Big Five had verified the bimodal intuition because "these traits are correlated" ...

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