"Smile" vs. "Poop!"

Or, On The Art of Auto-Translation

Something I care a lot about is translation.

If I want to convey something to you, and all I have are words, and you speak a different language, how can I do it? I can attempt to match my words to your words, but the way our different languages’ words carve up the world might not even have a 1-to-1 mapping! This means there might be tons of overflow: maybe one word in my language is two in yours, or is only “kinda” like this other word in yours, or maybe it’s “untranslatable” and there’s no words for it, or maybe it’s only half of a word in yours: can’t use it to say what I mean without also smuggling in something I don’t.

I think of language-as-translation as tightening the screws on a board. You don’t tighten one screw fully and then the next one fully and so on. You tighten each a little bit, in sequence, and each ends up tightening the other. As with screws, so with words: each one ‘tightens’ the space of what can be meant a little bit, until the message can be pinned down.

Part of why I care about this is because of consent, especially around transformative experiences.

For example, think of Awakening, as in Buddhist Enlightenment. (See what I did there? Three screws.)

I am not enlightened. I’m pre-enlightenment. But I’ve intuited enough about it to lead me to believe that no one can meaningfully consent to it because no one can meaningfully understand it without going through it. That is, there can be no “pre-Enlightenment” translation of what it is like such that you could make a meaningfully informed decision to consent to it, or not.

A bit like becoming a Vampire. Modern consent-sensitive Dracula hands you a flyer: pros, cons, immortal nightlife; and offers to bite you. Can you consent in an informed way? I’d say no: you can never know what it’s like to be a Vampire prior to your own vampirism, at which point it’s too late. As with vampirism, so with Enlightenment.

I don’t know any vampires, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Enlightened people express this very frustration. As if they were always speaking underwater, perennially misunderstood. Some translations may be structurally impossible.

Now if translation were only a problem for Enlightened people and Vampire I’d feel pretty good.

But I don’t think that’s the case. I think failures of translation happen all the time, and especially between people using the same language.

Me, for example: I’ve been tripping over myself for years now trying to explain a specific linguistic trap. But I think that, 5 years in, the picture above helped me finally nail it.

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Look at the picture above. Now back to me. On the left the kid is doing a cringe-like attempt at smiling. In the second one, he’s smiling. The dad, who’s taking the picture, wanted him to smile. His first instruction—a direct instruction—failed to generate the mental image that would lead to the outcome desired. The second succeeded. Maybe this is why Zen masters use sticks.

“Do or do not, there is no try”, wrong master. Anyways, the point is this: the kid can smile. But he can’t smile on command. Upon hearing “Smile” he tries to smile. And he succeeds at that: the pictures are great because they're both pictures of success: the first the success of the kid—at Trying—, the second the success of the father—at translating. “Poop!”

If the kid was still a kid, but less of a kid, upon hearing “Smile!” he would reflexively, even maybe unconsciously, think “Poop!”, and end up smiling as a consequence. An extra move has to be performed: a translation from the intention of the father, that the kid evidently wants to follow, to what will actually generate the outcome the father desires.

The father, probably more experienced, hears “Smile!” and thinks whatever the adult equivalent of “Poop!” is, or, better yet, just smiles. Maybe for him there is no extra step needed anymore, maybe it’s just Intention → Outcome. “Smile” → Smile. But for the kid there must be, translation is necessary:

Intention (“Smile!”) --> (Translation: “Poop!”) - -> Outcome (smile).

Now, someone needs to do this translation work. In this case the father did it, brilliantly. In the future, hopefully, the kid can internalise it, through the normal social learning of watching his father say “Poop!”, and grow up to be a very normal and well socialised adult.

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I said above the father needs no extra steps. But is that true? Maybe it’s true for smiling in a picture. But is it true of everything? Can the father intend to Make More Money—to choose a random common problem—and just start immediately taking actions likely, in expectation, to make him more money? Maybe he can. But lots of people cannot. The same way the kid succeeds at visibly trying to smile they’ll succeed at visibly trying to make more money. “I really need to get my shit together”. No one other than themselves even needs to see it for it to be visible: beating yourself up, be it out loud or as part of your inner monologue, is more than enough.

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The same way the kid needed someone to do translation for him to successfully smile, maybe the father needs someone to do translation for him to successfully make more money.

Yes, this is the Buddhist finger pointing at the moon meme all over again, except that if that’s what you’re thinking then you didn’t get it.

You need to go beyond the words towards the intended outcome the speaker had in mind and to craft your own path towards it. Or at least, someone has to. If you’re young your dad does it for you, if you’re older your therapist or coach, or friend… or favorite writer, do it. If you’re lucky. If not you just keep going round in circles, beating yourself up in your internal monologue.

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Speaking of writers: I love philosophers. Yes, they’ve thought about every thing one too many times tying themselves into knots as a consequence, but, in the process they’ve created much useful language we can misappropriate for our own ends.

An example of those: second-order intentions.

To wit: intending something is just that. Those are first-order intentions. “I want ice-cream”. Second-order intentions are a level up. They are intentions about your intentions “I’m too fat and want to stop wanting ice-creams”.

Another way of saying what I’ve been saying above is that people, very often, and without noticing, fail at auto-translation by turning what was expressed to be first-order intention into a second-order intention “Smile!” gets translated to “Try to smile” and correctly executed as such instead of being translated to “Do what it takes to smile… I know: Poop! 😁”. “Make more money” gets translated to “Try to make more money” and correctly executed as beating yourself up over not making more money. Success(?)

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A good and relevant tweet by Tyler. What it’s effectively saying is: some outcomes you can’t intend at directly. None of what he mentions—dating, networking—are discrete, actionable tasks. They’re emergent states, consequences, i.e. outcomes, of doing something else. You can’t just do things that can only happen.

Tyler’s genius in this tweet is that “Just literally go to places where people interact and see who you vibe with regardless of what category they fit in” is far too long for people to have the temptation to reify into an Outcome to then attempt to directly Intend.

But, should it be something shorter, they might. And the moment that got taken up as something to directly intend as an outcome, the moment that the “just” is dropped, then the finger gets calcified and stops successfully pointing: a finger that points at everything points at nothing.

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Another good tweet, this time by Nick.

The point of Nick' tweet is this: people read “don’t try to be happy” and mishear it as DON’T try to be happy. But what Nick is saying is don’t Try To Be Happy.

That is: the same auto-translation failure that ensured that the original intention didn’t get across also ensures that the correction to this failure doesn’t get across either.

A Chinese finger trap. And, while it might be difficult to muster empathy for even hypothetical vampires who care about consent, maybe this allows us to muster empathy for Awakened people’s desperate attempts to communicate with us through their """""woo"""""?

To say the same in a different way: the same way that “Smile!” got auto-translated by the kid into “Try To Smile”—which ends up producing that uncanny valley MrBeast smile—the corrective “Don’t try to smile!” gets auto-translated into “Don’t Smile!” instead of just… “Poop!”. In the same way, if you just auto-translated this essay-corrective into an old Buddhist analogy…

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“Yea, ok, but who cares, how is any of this relevant to me?” I am happy to learn you didn’t relate to the difficulty in making more money issue above. That’s excellent, the subscribe button is right there.

But a second example, then: the gym. There are lots of things going on in the gym—certainly deserving of their own essay—but one of those absolutely is a failure of auto-translation.

The gym is a place to do exercise to get healthy. Everyone knows that. But that gets fast auto-translated into Doing Exercise and Getting Healthy. Like with Tyler’s tweet above people try to intend an outcome directly, when it can only be an emergent consequence.

The upshot is what you see in most gyms—people trying to intend outcomes directly going on their phones to dissociate between bouts of contorting their bodies into what their mind judged “Good” moving from that mental place because that is where outcome-concepts like Healthy live.

A failure of auto-translation.

Tweet related: a warning of the potentially dire consequences of failures of auto-translation

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Ok, enough foreplay, time to go for the jugular.

The video above illustrates the difference between someone who can do the auto-translation necessary to “catch” and someone who can’t’. Poop!, vs Smile—this time for grown-ups.

The difference between these two is what I've been trying to point at in this whole essay. “How is this relevant to me?” Do you catch like that? If you don’t, then it is.

If you don’t, but also don’t ask questions that reveal a lack of faith in your favourite writer, please don’t feel bad. This problem is ancient and we’ve been battling it for eons because of the way our mind and language interact. It’s very easy to screw up auto-translating by attempting to reify outcomes into intentions we directly try to pursue, without any translation bridging. Like pressing the wrong button on a joystick.

This tendency then requires a bunch of historical linguistic innovations to point at. “Wu wei”, “non-doing”, “un-doing” are all this: pointing at failures of auto-translation causing people to try directly enact something that can only be enacted indirectly, either because of the necessity of translation, or because of its very nature, like in Tyler’s tweet above.

We need to keep freshening up our language with new essays and new words that say “the same old thing” because past ways of saying themselves get reified, solidified, calcified, and the previous translations stop working. The work of translation is endless.

To go back to the start: how do we convey something to one another, when we speak a different language—even if we speak the same language—and all we have are words?

My suggestion is that we do so by each of us taking ownership of our own auto-translation.

Poop!