If Orson Scott Card had finished writing Ender books in 1987, his achievement would have been immortal. Had he stopped in 1999, he would have been a great writer, but flawed.

But he keeps writing sequels. Alas, what can one say?

I explain what I call “frame errors”: a third kind of mistake, distinct from logical fallacies and empirical errors. You can get every fact right and every inference valid, and still be wrong, because your framework for reasoning about the problem is structurally inadequate.

In some sense, the idea is not new. Many other thinkers have pointed out specific instantiations of these mistakes before. However, I coin the “frame error” term to draw attention to the common category across these mistakes, provide tools and worked examples to help readers spot these errors when they occur, and offer advice to help readers understand and identify the meta-errors that might lead them or others to commit frame errors.

This post goes through five common classes of frame errors, with worked examples. I start with examples that people likely have heard of before, and then end with more novel examples where I was the first person to explicitly point out such errors.

Please let me know what you think! Happy to discuss any point of the article that people think is incorrect or confusing!

Scope Mismatch

Can corporate greed explain inflation?

>

Most of my readers presumably understand that Alice’s model is inadequate. But why is it wrong?

The facts are correct: The price of groceries did go up. And CEOs are known to be greedy. The internal logic also seems kinda reasonable: A greedy CEO wants to make more money, so naturally (s)he increases the price of groceries.

But of course the overall model is wrong. Not just “it’s a nuanced issue,” entirely wrong. This is because a CEO’s greed is approximately constant, but the price is varying. It’s unlikely that inflation happens because CEOs suddenly get more greedy, and prices drop because the CEOs suddenly become less greedy.

One level of abstraction up, we can form a general principle for understanding a subset of frame errors: You can’t explain a changing result by reference to a cause that’s unchanging. And its corollary: You can’t explain something that’s unchanging via reference to a variable cause.

In a broader sense, we get to an even more general principle: Every causal explanation of a contrast makes an implicit promise: the cause it points to changes wherever the effect changes. A scope mismatch, then, is when that promise is broken: when your explanation is not along the same dimension, or at the same scale, as the outcome you purport to explain.

Related: Proving too much

Two other examples of scope mismatch (that I don’t fully explain but encourage readers to work through themselves):

1. People sometimes use pop evolutionary psychology to explain changes in modern dating norms or other social shifts. I find it very suspicious that people are using something like evo-psych (millennia timescale) to explain 50-year behavioral shifts.
2. People sometimes use America-specific factors to explain global phenomena (e.g. Roe vs Wade to explain the rise and fall of crime), or global factors to explain America-specific phenomena (e.g. social media and smartphones to explain greater US political polarization). Why this is suspicious is left as an exercise to the reader.

[...]

4 other examples below.

I'm pretty sure the "to speak plainly with the people, use words of Anglo rather than Latin origin" point is itself an anachronism and affectation.

I think most decent writers have a pretty good "vibe" for which words are common vs not, already. But if you're unsure, statistical frequency tests are a better proxy for familiarity than etymology.

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Attempted rewrite:

I reckon the rede "to speak straight with the folk, reach for words of Anglo root, rather than that of the Walnut Folk" is itself a thing out of its own time, and a put-on of the highest kind.

I think most writers worth their salt already have a pretty good ken for which words are everyday and which aren’t. But if you can't rightly tell, a reckoning of how oft a word shows up is a better bellwether for how couth it is than a word’s wellspring.

(OC)

I'm pretty sure the "to speak plainly with the people, use words of Anglo rather than Latin origin" point is itself an anachronism and affectation.

I think most decent writers have a pretty good "vibe" for which words are common vs not, already. But if you're unsure, statistical frequency tests are a better proxy for familiarity than etymology.

__

Attempted rewrite:

I reckon the rede "to speak straight with the folk, reach for words of Anglo root, rather than that of the Walnut Folk" is itself a thing out of its own time, and a put-on of the highest kind.

I think most writers worth their salt already have a pretty good ken for which words are everyday and which aren’t. But if you can't rightly tell, a reckoning of how oft a word shows up is a better bellwether for how couth it is than a word’s wellspring.

(OC)

I finally finished reading The Dispossessed. I quite enjoyed the book and the world-building but am confused about what happened afterwards.

>!Did Shevek make it out okay? Did Uras adopt anarchocommunism? Was Anarres able to finally industrialize and be wealthy while mainintaing their values? Did the Terrans managed to heal their home planet (Earth) from the environmental ravages?!<

Google tells me there are other books in the Hainish cycle set loosely in the same universe, but no direct sequels.

Upon arrival, God offers to answer any question they have. The Tweeter asks, "Just one. What's the correct answer to the button question?"

God responds: "The blue button"

The Twitter user pauses, nods, and says, "Wow. The virtue signaling goes even higher than I thought".