Loss aversion is not what we think it is

Consider racism. Most (or at least much) of the time it's really just a more salient and specific version of the 'in-group bias'. And I'd argue that on an academic level, researching and discussing it as the latter is vastly preferable to using the much more loaded concept of racism. But on a societal level it perhaps makes sense that we treat 'racism' as a category in itself.

Personally I think discussing whether x is 'just' a subset of y is less valuable than carefully delineating the contexts in which we use particular terms. For example, I wish that on a societal level we'd consider 'innate' differences a bit of a taboo, but that on an academic level we could go wild researching, say, IQ differences of particular populations without it being coopted by politically motivated individuals.

I vaguely recall Steven Pinker (almost?) making that argument in The Blank Slate, and even though I've never read Anathem, I understand one theme is the idea of having academics locked up and doing research similar to orders of monks isolating themselves from the world.

At the risk of this becoming (even more of) a ramble, I can't help but wonder what effect our increasing interconnectedness and the inability to do something in isolation has on all of this.

For instance, if you state that (paraphrasing) racism is wrapped up in 'in-group bias' and it turns out that people are actually racist because of something in our DNA (similar to being afraid of spiders) or something like that (NB: completely contrived, to provide context related to your comment), the you would have lost the truth in a higher abstraction layer, by hiding the underlying principle.

Now, abstraction is a helpful tool, but it should be used to abstract things to the level necessary to convey an exact message. Einstein might have said, "Abstract things as high and low as necessary, while preserving the truth, but no higher or lower."... but in the meantime, I made that quote up.

Take, for instance, my "Anchoring" example. There are more fundamental things that are going on beneath the "Anchoring" abstraction. Perhaps a specific part of the human psyche, which is also responsible for recognizing patterns (e.g., Reticular Activating System) is also responsible for the mental constructs that lead to such a cognitive bias. But, once that science is understood sufficiently enough to be trusted, a concept like "Anchoring" is a helpful delineation.

In the aforementioned case of racism that I contrived, the abstraction layer of "racism" and the perceived lower level abstraction "in-group bias" hides the truth, and this fallacious abstraction actually becomes, as Noam Chomsky might suggest, a part of our mental grammar, which prevents us from ever learning the truth, unless the abstraction is broken in our minds.

Could it be that on societal level creating a separate category like 'racist' is important and valuable, even if it's technically a 'fallacious' abstraction? We don't always have the time to properly get to the bottom of things, assuming all of us are even capable of doing so, so we're going to grasp for salient categories anyways.

It vaguely reminds me of the discussions here about functional programming versus object-oriented programming. Alongside the heated debate for and against either approach (and the definitions of the 'true' version of each), there's always someone who points out something like 'closures are just a poor man's objects', and 'objects are just a poor man's closures'.

Even if, for the sake of argument, the differences between FP and OP are not as fundamental or clear-cut as they seem, I'd argue that for me and many others these discussions are very useful. I'd never get out of my 'OOP box' to explore FP if it wasn't contrasted and put in a whole separate category and given a bunch of tantalizing pros that pull me to investigate.

Isn't 'truth' really just another abstraction, but one we cannot (yet) dive into to find the underlying 'truth'? What I mean is, we stop at a certain point not only because it's where we end up at for the time being, but also because it's a useful abstraction.

And to be clear, I'm arguing this primarily in the context of the already very murky and messy field of the social sciences / psychology, where definitions are a lot less definitive than in physics or mathematics, and where they have a much more immediate effect on society.

(honestly, I'm not sure I'm disagreeing with you, and I'm sorry if I'm perhaps not making much sense. I'm not usually this openly... explorative in my comments here. Your comment(s) just tickled my brain in a good way.)

Thanks for the reply. I just now saw this (haven't been nearly as active on here for the past week).

I enjoyed reading your reply. I had just one comment back:

> Isn't 'truth' really just another abstraction, but one we cannot (yet) dive into to find the underlying 'truth'?

It's not, because 'truth' is a logical construct, an a priori kind of concept, so whatever that 'truth' is that we find underneath what was once thought to be truth would just be a more fundamental truth (e.g., we discover that photons are actually an imbalance in another dimension or something).