"Canalization"?
Unclenching, Part 5.2
This is a comment on my last post.
“Canalization” is an awkward bit of jargon, right?
I'll probably keep using it. It’s good to lean on terms that already exist. At least a few people are already canalized into using “canalized”, and they’ll understand me better if I am, too.
And what about everyone else, the majority who don't speak fluent landscapese? Mental health professionals, can you imagine telling a patient "your energy landscape is over-canalized"?
I have a similar but less averse reaction to Scott Alexander's phrase trapped priors. It’s not hard to figure roughly what it’s pointing at, even if you haven’t studied Bayesian probability. Maybe “trapped” is doing more of the lifting, there. But trapped how? Sometimes I find myself wanting to evoke more of the embodied roots of the trap.
I'm no psychiatrist. Maybe y’all have this figured out. Do you need precise terms when speaking with patients? I guess it’s not so important for you to share literal jargon.
Still, haven’t we found some nice jargon! I worship idols as much as the next guy, but do we really need this? What are the best words that people already possess, that we can use as-is for our purpose?
As you’ve probably guessed, I usually prefer contract1 to canalize, and clenching2 to over-canalization. They call forth images not just of the strengthening influences among the system’s parts, or the pinched contours of its landscape, but also the tightness of mind and muscle we animals have suffered since long before the first mention of mathematics.
“Canalization” is certainly the more precise term, in a sense. When I speak it, I know that the people who’ll parse my meaning are those who are already close to seeing what I’d like them to see. The canal paper has experts speaking to experts. But in hindsight, at the time I first read the paper, I don’t think I was aching for a new word to talk about this particular phenomenon. Of course I enjoy having a more robust vocabulary. But when I use clenching as a metaphor for trapped behaviour, people catch on quickly because it’s hardly even a metaphor.
When I say “canalization” in public, on the other hand, I can’t help but feel that I’m doing someone a disservice. (I’m probably just clenching.)
There’s a cost to being precise. Precision is canalization. You and I are contracting over how to use language—over when to be precise and exclusive, versus flexible and wide. With respect to this tradeoff, we have our stances. All of this is part of mine.3
Here’s a challenge: find a usage of “contract” or “clench” that’s maximally at odds with the way I’ve used them in this series—a usage that doesn’t describe parts of a system coming together, and moving more predictably with respect to each other.
Can you name some nicer valley I should move to?
“Contracting” does have a formal meaning in the context of dynamical systems. As far as I can tell, it concerns the geometric analysis of how tightly a system’s paths through state space tend to converge on an attractor, which has implications for the system’s stability near the attractor. This vibes well with our own, less precise usage.
Or too robust.
Clearly I also like robusten and robustening, but those are closer to jargon. I’ve been using them specifically to distinguish the model-free robustness of robust control theory—involving a local process of stabilization or canalization of a system’s attractors—from the open-ended robustness of intelligent agents, which neuroscientists and AI researchers allude to wistfully but which is a lot more difficult to explain.