Monthly Archives: October 2025

"Yes, and—" Requires the Possibility of "No, Because—"

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Scott Garrabrant gives a number of examples to illustrate that “Yes Requires the Possibility of No”. We can understand the principle in terms of information theory. Consider the answer to a yes-or-no question as a binary random variable. The “amount of information” associated with a random variable is quantified by the entropy, the expected value of the negative logarithm of the probability of the outcome. If we know in advance of asking that the answer to the question will always be Yes, then the entropy is −P(Yes)·log(P(Yes)) − P(No)·log(P(No)) = −1·log(1) − 0·log(0) = 0.1 If you already knew what the answer would be, then the answer contains no information; you didn’t learn anything new by asking.

In the art of improvisational theater (“improv” for short), actors perform scenes that they make up as they go along. Without a script, each actor’s choices of what to say and do amount to implied assertions about the fictional reality being portrayed, which have implications for how the other actors should behave. A choice that establishes facts or gives direction to the scene is called an offer. If an actor opens a scene by asking their partner, “Is it serious, Doc?”, that’s an offer that the first actor is playing a patient awaiting diagnosis, and the second actor is playing a doctor.

A key principle of improv is often known as “Yes, and” after an exercise that involves starting replies with those words verbatim, but the principle is broader and doesn’t depend on the particular words used: actors should “accept” offers (“Yes”), and respond with their own complementary offers (“and”). The practice of “Yes, and” is important for maintaining momentum while building out the reality of the scene.

Rejecting an offer is called blocking, and is frowned upon. If one actor opens the scene with, “Surrender, Agent Stone, or I’ll shoot these hostages!”—establishing a scene in which they’re playing an armed villain being confronted by an Agent Stone—it wouldn’t do for their partner to block by replying, “That’s not my name, you don’t have a gun, and there are no hostages.” That would halt the momentum and confuse the audience. Better for the second actor to say, “Go ahead and shoot, Dr. Skull! You’ll find that my double agent on your team has stolen your bullets”—accepting the premise (“Yes”), then adding new elements to the scene (“and”, the villain’s name and the double agent).

Notice a subtlety: the Agent Stone character isn’t “Yes, and”-ing the Dr. Skull character’s demand to surrender. Rather, the second actor is “Yes, and”-ing the first actor’s worldbuilding offers (where the offer happens to involve their characters being in conflict). Novice improvisers are sometimes tempted to block to try to control the scene when they don’t like their partner’s offers, but it’s almost always a mistake. Persistently blocking your partner’s offers kills the vibe, and with it, the scene. No one wants to watch two people arguing back-and-forth about what reality is.

Proponents of collaborative truthseeking think that many discussions benefit from a more “open” or “interpretive” mode in which participants prioritize constructive contributions that build on each other’s work rather than tearing each other down.

The analogy to improv’s “Yes, and” doctrine writes itself, right down to the subtlety that collaborative truthseeking does not discourage disagreement as such—any more than the characters in an improv sketch aren’t allowed to be in conflict. What’s discouraged is the persistent blocking of offers, refusing to cooperate with the “scene” of discourse your partner is trying to build. Partial disagreement with polite elaboration (“I see what you’re getting at, but have you considered …”) is typically part of the offer—that we’re “playing” reasonable people having a cooperative intellectual discussion. Only wholesale negation (“That’s not a thing”) is blocking—by rejecting the offer that we’re both playing reasonable people.

Whatever you might privately think of your interlocutor’s contribution, it’s not hard to respond in a constructive manner without lying. Like a good improv actor, you can accept their contribution to the scene/discourse (“Yes”), then add your own contribution (“and”). If nothing else, you can write about how their comment reminded you of something else you’ve read, and your thoughts about that.

Reading over a discussion conducted under such norms, it’s easy to not see a problem. People are building on each other’s contributions; information is being exchanged. That’s good, right?

The problem is that while the individual comments might (or might not) make sense when read individually, the harmonious social exchange of mutually building on each other’s contributions isn’t really a conversation unless the replies connect to each other in a less superficial way that risks blocking.

What happens when someone says something wrong or confusing or unclear? If their interlocutor prioritizes correctness and clarity, the natural behavior is to say, “No, that’s wrong, because …” or “No, I didn’t understand that”—and not only that, but to maintain that “No” until clarity is forthcoming. That’s blocking. It feels much more cooperative to let it pass in order to keep the scene going—with the result that falsehood, confusion, and unclarity accumulate as the interaction goes on.

There’s a reason improv is almost synonymous with improv comedy. Comedy thrives on absurdity: much of the thrill and joy of improv comedy is in appreciating what lengths of cleverness the actors will go to maintain the energy of a scene that has long since lost any semblance of coherence or plausibility. The rules that work for improv comedy don’t even work for (non-improvised, dramatic) fiction; it certainly won’t work for philosophy.

Per Garrabrant’s principle, the only way an author could reliably expect discussion of their work to illuminate what they’re trying to communicate is if they knew they were saying something the audence already believed. If you’re thinking carefully about what the other person said, you’re often going to end up saying “No” or “I don’t understand”, not just “Yes, and”: if you’re committed to validating your interlocutor’s contribution to the scene before providing your own, you’re not really talking to each other.

  1. I’m glossing over a technical subtlety here by assuming—pretending?—that 0·log(0) = 0, when log(0) is actually undefined. But it’s the correct thing to pretend, because the linear factor p goes to zero faster than log p can go to negative infinity. Formally: \lim_{p \to 0^+} p \log(p) = \lim_{p \to 0^+} \frac{\log(p)}{1/p} = \lim_{p \to 0^+} \frac{1/p}{-1/p^2} = 0


The Relationship Between Social Punishment and Shared Maps

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A punishment is when one agent (the punisher) imposes costs on another (the punished) in order to affect the punished’s behavior. In a Society where thieves are predictably imprisoned and lashed, people will predictably steal less than they otherwise would, for fear of being imprisoned and lashed.

Punishment is often imposed by formal institutions like police and judicial systems, but need not be. A controversial orator who finds a rock thrown through her window can be said to have been punished in the same sense: in a Society where controversial orators predictably get rocks thrown through their windows, people will predictably engage in less controversial speech, for fear of getting rocks thrown through their windows.

In the most basic forms of punishment, which we might term “physical”, the nature of the cost imposed on the punished is straightforward. No one likes being stuck in prison, or being lashed, or having a rock thrown through her window.

But subtler forms of punishment are possible. Humans are an intensely social species: we depend on friendship and trade with each other in order to survive and thrive. Withholding friendship or trade can be its own form of punishment, no less devastating than a whip or a rock. This is called “social punishment”.

Effective social punishment usually faces more complexities of implementation than physical punishment, because of the greater number of participants needed in order to have the desired deterrent effect. Throwing a rock only requires one person to have a rock; effectively depriving a punishment-target of friendship may require many potential friends to withhold their beneficence.

How is the collective effort of social punishment to be coordinated? If human Societies were hive-minds featuring an Authority that could broadcast commands to be reliably obeyed by the hive’s members, then there would be no problem. If the hive-queen wanted to socially punish Mallory, she could just issue a command, “We’re giving Mallory the silent treatment now”, and her majesty’s will would be done.

No such Authority exists. But while human Societies lack a collective will, they often have something much closer to collective beliefs: shared maps that (hopefully) reflect the territory. No one can observe enough or think quickly enough to form her own independent beliefs about everything. Most of what we think we know comes from others, who in turn learned it from others. Furthermore, one of our most decision-relevant classes of belief concern the character and capabilities of other people with whom we might engage in friendship or trade relations.

As a consequence, social punishment is typically implemented by means of reputation: spreading beliefs about the punishment-target that merely imply that benefits should be withheld from the target, rather than by directly coordinating explicit sanctions. Social punishers don’t say, “We’re giving Mallory the silent treatment now.” (Because, who’s we?) They simply say that Mallory is stupid, dishonest, cruel, ugly, &c. These are beliefs that, if true, imply that people will do worse for themselves by helping Mallory. (If Mallory is stupid, she won’t be as capable of repaying favors. If she’s dishonest, she might lie to you. If she’s cruel … &c.) Negative-valence beliefs about Mallory double as “social punishments”, because if those beliefs appear on shared maps, the predictable consequence will be that Mallory will be deprived of friendship and trade opportunities.

We notice a critical difference between social punishments and physical punishments. Beliefs can be true or false. A rock or a jail cell is not a belief. You can’t say that the rock is false, but you can say it’s false that Mallory is stupid.

The linkage between collective beliefs and social punishment creates distortions that are important to track. People have an incentive to lie to prevent negative-valence beliefs about themselves from appearing on shared maps (even if the beliefs are true). People who have enemies whom they hate have an incentive to lie to insert negative-valence beliefs about their enemies onto the shared map (even if the beliefs are false). The stakes are high: an erroneously thrown rock only affects its target, but an erroneous map affects everyone using that map to make decisions about the world (including decisions about throwing rocks).

Intimidated by the stakes, some actors in Society who understand the similarity between social and physical punishment, but don’t understand the relationship between social punishment and shared maps, might try to take steps to limit social punishment. It would be bad, they reason, if people were trapped in a cycle of mutual recrimination of physical punishments. Nobody wins if I throw a rock through your window to retaliate for you throwing a rock through my window, &c. Better to foresee that and make sure no one throws any rocks at all, or at least not big ones. They imagine that they can apply the same reasoning to social punishments without paying any costs to the accuracy of shared maps, that we can account for social standing and status in our communication without sacrificing any truthseeking.

It’s mostly an illusion. If Alice possesses evidence that Mallory is stupid, dishonest, cruel, ugly, &c., she might want to publish that evidence in order to improve the accuracy of shared maps of Mallory’s character and capabilities. If the evidence is real and its recipients understand the filters through which it reached them, publishing the evidence is prosocial, because it helps people make higher-quality decisions regarding friendship and trade opportunities with Mallory.

But it also functions as social punishment. If Alice tries to disclaim, “Look, I’m not trying to ‘socially punish’ Mallory; I’m just providing evidence to update the part of the shared map which happens to be about Mallory’s character and capabilities”, then Bob, Carol, and Dave probably won’t find the disclaimer very convincing.

And yet—might not Alice be telling the truth? There are facts of the matter that are relevant to whether Mallory is stupid, dishonest, cruel, ugly, &c.! (Even if we’re not sure where to draw the boundary of dishonest, if Mallory said something false, and we can check that, and she knew it was false, and we can check that from her statements elsewhere, that should make people more likely to affirm the dishonest characterization.) Those words mean things! They’re not rocks—or not only rocks. Is there any way to update the shared map without the update itself being construed as “punishment”?

It’s questionable. One might imagine that by applying sufficient scrutiny to nuances of tone and word choice, Alice might succeed at “neutrally” conveying the evidence in her possession without any associated scorn or judgment.

But judgments supervene on facts and values. If lying is bad, and Mallory lied, it logically follows that Mallory did a bad thing. There’s no way to avoid that implication without denying one of the premises. Nuances of tone and wording that seem to convey an absence of judgment might only succeed at doing so by means of obfuscation: strained abuses of language whose only function is to make it less clear to the inattentive reader that the thing Mallory did was lying.

At best, Alice might hope to craft the publication of the evidence in a way that omits her own policy response. There is a real difference between merely communicating that Mallory is stupid, dishonest, cruel, ugly, &c. (with the understanding that other people will use this information to inform their policies about trade opportunities), and furthermore adding that “therefore I, Alice, am going to withhold trade opportunities from Mallory, and withhold trade opportunities from those who don’t withhold trade opportunities from her.” The additional information about Alice’s own policy response might be exposed by fiery rhetoric choices and concealed by more clinical descriptions.

Is that enough to make the clinical description not a “social punishment”? Personally, I buy it, but I don’t think Bob, Carol, or Dave do.