# You can tell a drawing from a painting

*Epistemic status: I've had this concept for a while, and applied it in practice many times. It's fairly easy to convey in an argument, and can clear up some confusion. But there are many loose ends, and I'm not sure it's well formulated. Also, I'm stuck, so I'll just throw it out there, hoping that it grows into something.*

### Drawings and paintings

You are presented with a *.bmp* file containing a digitalized version of two art pieces. You are told that one is a drawing and the other is a painting. Can you tell which one is which?

On one hand, of course you can't. The *.bmp* file format doesn't contain information about the history of some clumps of matter on some rock in space. All you have is the color of each pixel (plus some technical stuff). Clearly, the one that looks like a painting could be the result of the artist very carefully drawing every tiny square milimeter of the image so that the digitalized version is equivalent, pixel by pixel, to the *.bmp* file you are looking at right now...

On the other hand, that's not what happened. The only way doubt can even arise is if the images were adversarially designed for this very purpose. Even then, it'd take a skillful artist and some serious effort to succesfully confuse people, especially other artists.

### Plotting

Some writers prefer to start working on their novel by planning the whole plot before actually putting words on paper, while others just start writing a story and see where it goes. If you haven't encountered this distinction before, you may want to pause for a few seconds to figure out how it will affect the sort of book that results.

Stories that are written without a pre-planned plot tend to be more locally consistent. The characters' decisions are not constrained by where the plot needs to go, so they will be better aligned with their personalities, motivations, and pasts. Consequences follow more clearly from causes, because the causes aren't backwards-engineered to fit the pre-determined consequences. But you'll get a meandering story that doesn't seem to move towards a conclusion. A good example is A Song of Ice and Fire. Stories that are written with a clear outline planned in advance feel more coherent as a whole, have a conclusion, and plot twists make sense. However, characters may at times act in ways that make little sense just to keep the plot going. An example is the Harry Potter series.

But you could just write the exact same words with the other method, right?

### Bottom lines

You are considering an argument. Did the person making it draw the conclusion from the argument, or did they tailor the argument to fit their pet conclusion?

In theory, you can come up with the same argument either way. In practice though...

### Go

So your friend has decided to decorate an empty wall in their room with two images of board states of Go after 50 moves. One, apparently, was produced by your friend downloading some Go software and throwing stones on the board against an AI. The other one is a game between two professionals. There is a clear difference between the two, even functionally: Go players visiting that room will draw aesthetic pleasure from one but not the other.

Of course there is nothing stopping your friend from playing moves indistinguishable from those of a top player. In practice, though, he can't. What's more, I think it's impossible for a professional to mimic the play of a beginner, even with access to a source of randomness. And yet, if you aren't a Go player, to you the two may look fundamentally no different. Telling the difference requires at least a little expertise.

### Programming languages

You are presented two long lists of numbers. One is a list of prime numbers generated by an algorithm in Python, the other one by an algorithm in C. Of course, anyone who is an expert on prime numbers will be able to tell them apart.

### Utility functions

You are casually walking in a forest when you suddenly notice an agent. You don't know how the agent works, only its actions. Can you tell if the agent is internally optimizing for some utility function?

Of course, any agent has some utility function, e.g. the one that assigns 42 utilons to it doing precisely the thing it ends up doing at precisely the time it ends up doing that, and 0 otherwise.

And yet you can tell that the rock you stumbled into isn't in fact internally optimizing for a utility function.

### Bit sequences

Your friend has decided to decorate a wall in their room with two sequences of 1s and 0s. One was generated by taking a 99-bit random number, plus a 1-bit checksum. The other one was generated the same way, except your friend later flipped a bit. You can of course tell the difference with a bit of expertise (no pun intended), but then the wall is rather ugly in both places and that pretty much sums it all up (no pun intended).

### Lies

So let's say you read two claims on Twitter. For the sake of simplicity let's assume that you have absolutely no way to fact-check either of them, but somehow you know for sure that precisely one of them is true. One of them claims that hackers have hacked Russian spy satellites, the other one claims that hackers have access to the "phone directory of the military prosecutor's office of the southern military district of Russia". *(Disclaimer: this hypothetical scenario only partially reflects reality.)*

Fictitious claims are usually typical and generic in a way true claims aren't, and also tend to be better aligned with the interests of the person making the claim.

This understanding is something I apply extensively, and not only to identify lies. You see, there is a large demand for fictional stories presented as real in the form of novels, movies, video games, etc. In particular, I realized that there is a noticeable difference between works set in an already existing fictional world established by earlier worldbuilding, and works where the worldbuilding is done specifically to support the work in question. You probably need some expertise to notice the difference, but in my experience it's very relevant for creating immersion.

But both methods just result in a story, a sequence of words, right?

### Typing or handwriting

Did I write and edit this post by typing on a keyboard, or did I copy it over from the original pen-on-paper version? Sure, I could in theory have done the latter and ended up with these very words, but I changed this sentence alone multiple times already, and I'm not even sure how I'm going to finish it yet, but it's getting disturbingly self-reflective at this point, so I'd rather finish it already; so anyway, would I really have written precisely this sentence if I hadn't been able to conveniently edit it on the fly and instead had to think the whole thing through before writing the first word? Is this difference relevant for any practical purpose?

### Armchair philosophy

You are reading an essay about an interesting concept. Was it conceived by a person sitting in an armchair, rubbing their chin, or someone taking a walk in a beautiful park?

There are Many People™ with an implicit assumption that Coming to Correct Conclusions is just a sequence of Thinking Thoughts, and since Thinking Thoughts happens in the brain and you have a brain while sitting in an armchair too, you could just draw the exact same conclusions there as you would in a park.

Yes, in theory, you could.

Reading books reportedly has the effect that the reader forms models of the world they would't otherwise form. Appreciating art can also spark insights, even when the art has no propositional content. Being tortured is not conducive to creating accurate high-level maps. Some funny people even make some funny claims like that sitting in silence for a while is necessary to understand certain aspects of the world.

In a park, light conditions are going to be different, which affects alertness. Walking affects blood flow to the brain. [Context-dependent memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-dependent_memory) is a thing.

Of course, I couldn't tell the difference just by reading the resulting essay. Maybe an expert on armchair-sitting and park-walking could. Maybe a strong enough classifier AI could. But by default, in the absence of a strong argument otherwise, I'll assume that the effect is significant in some direction, and relevant along at least some reasonable values humans might care about.

### Twitter

Your friend recounts the contents of the latest conversation they had with a stranger on the internet. Was it a conversation limited to 280 character long units of transmission, or an exchange of longform essays, or a voice chat?

What would happen to your conversations with your friends if you introduced arbitrary rules to them? E.g. (babble):

*   every time you say something, your friend has to explain in their own words what they think you said,
*   the order in which participants are allowed to speak is fixed, and so those less confident are also forced to contribute to the conversation,
*   whenever an interesting point comes up, it's written down, and you keep returning to these points until there is nothing else left to say about them.

I know Many People™ (myself included) have an aversion to introducing arbitrary rules like that. Why not just let everyone talk whenever they feel like, and say whatever they feel like? But of course no one wants that: most people would agree that we need arbitrary rules such as "don't talk over each other", or that moderation is required in online spaces. Also, you can't avoid arbitrary rules, you can only decide between letting them be imposed by the environment in an accidental manner or consciously choosing them.

In theory, none of this should matter. In theory, it's possible to have intelligent discussion on Twitter.

### Final Thoughts

The method you use to create a product leaves its mark on it. The fact that the set of possible products two different methods can create is the same does not mean that the choice of your method is just a detail of implementation. Sometimes there is no difference at all, or no significant difference, or the difference is significant but mostly irrelevant relative to your goals, but you shouldn't assume this by default, without some strong arguments.

The power of this concept comes from being able to recognize it at work in various aspects of your life. This is an excellent topic to do your own babble on.

*Thanks to Justis for the feedback that helped me articulate my thoughts.*