It seems to me that stage 3 just means that you use correct scientific methods to learn & expand your knowledge (or am I missing something ?). If that is correct, wouldn’t that mean you could essentially recreate the entire body of human knowledge given enough time & persistence ?
The only knowledge that seems absolutely essential to me then is the scientific method itself. Given my human psychology I’m reasonable certain that without that knowledge I would dream up an entire pantheon of gods to explain away everything and just stop there.
There is a far way from using correct methods to actually discovering something important. There are almost infinitely many ways you can apply the methods, so you have to know where to look to find out the desired answers. Also, “given enough time & persistence” is a phrase which can very easily be misleading. You are certainly not in phase 3 if you needed 10^15 years to discover the relevant fact.
To be in stage 3 with general relativity, to take a particular example, you have to be in the state that after it being deleted from your head, given a question “how to reconcile Lorentz transformations and gravity”, it would instantly appear to you that the solution has something to do with curved spacetime and general covariance. You needn’t to know how the solution looks like at the first moment, but the rederivation should appear to you as the most natural chain of inductions, without stopping at crossroads and randomly (or systematically) checking all possible ways forward, albeit using scientific method.
After all, there were lots of people in 1910s who knew the scientific method and all available data, but only one has discovered general relativity, and only few others, if anybody, were even close.
Actually, Stage 3 works as a standard for the scientific method as well. That is, if knowledge of that specific method were deleted from your mind, would you rediscover it? Do you have an epistemology that would come up with an idea like, “Hey, I need to check these general ideas I have against nature, to see if they really hold” without it having been revealed to you in advance?
Ideally, you’d come up with (or have to start from!) something even better: the Bayesian rationalist method, of which the scientific method is a crippled, special case. While science is better than superstition, it also permits slower updates than you can justify, and often allows certain kinds of evidence that you shouldn’t count.
However, if you found yourself in a role analogous to “being one-eyed in the land of the blind”, and others’ minds weren’t capable of following Bayesian rationality, then you may want to teach them the scientific method as a next-best epistemology.
How did “Bayesian rationality” get discovered, except by the usual practices of scientists? (I won’t say “the scientific method”, partly because it’s really fuzzy and so the “the” at the beginning of the phrase is deceptively concrete, and partly because I don’t think that the process is as tidy as descriptions of the scientific method make it out to be.)
If we’re looking for an error-correcting system, we need to look for a vast number of weak epistemological principles, on the level of “if event X is followed almost immediately by event Y, guess that X is generally followed almost immediately by Y”, along with perceptual details of “how long?” and “what should count as an event?”.
They would probably be fiercely embodied, but that’s not actually a problem—we’re fiercely emphysicsed, after all.
Beyond a certain point, the “regenerate if deleted?” metric becomes useless. For example, if your entire source code is “0″, well, everything’s been deleted, but there’s no way it’s growing back. There has to be somewhere to start. (Related: Where recursive justification hits bottom)
Still, you can characterize epistemic states by how much they could recover, from how deep a deletion, which was one point of the Truly Part of You article. I can imagine simpler epistemic states, lacking knowledge of the scientific method, that could recover Bayesian rationality: you would need to recognize that primitive-future has dynamics very close to primitive-past (where primitive-X denotes the inborn, intuitive understanding of X), which gives you induction, and, combined with basic numeracy, could point you in the right direction.
That was my main problem with the definition of stage 3 and was why I posted my original comment. It seemed to me that you could apply stage 3 to parts of your knowledge but not for everything.
When I read ‘This stage should be the goal of all rationalists.’ (in the original post) I was confused because it seemed to me that stage 3 was unreachable. I mean, if I started with only my human psychology, my senses and the world around me (i.e. the level of a caveman) I don’t think I would invent math, physics,… Stage 3 seemed reachable if I assumed infinite time & persistence and scientific reasoning.
I don’t know about deducing the entire mindset & toolbox of ‘Bayesian rationality,’ but knowing Bayes’ theorem is the key part of it, and I wouldn’t expect that to be too hard to reconstruct if you knew what you look to for.
Bayes’ theorem follows trivially from the definition of conditional probability, and that definition is itself quite intuitive. So in theory, once you have a feel for what probability is, it’d be quite possible to get to Bayes’ theorem. I haven’t read Huygens’ 1657 book on probability theory, but if it was any good, I bet Huygens knew enough about it to beat Bayes to Bayes’ theorem by a century.
Chapters 1 and 2 of Jaynes’ Probability Theory: The Logic of Science show how Bayes’ theorem follows necessarily from certain basic principles of plausible reasoning. In some sense all roads lead to Bayes when trying to derive a consistent mathematical procedure for manipulating degrees of plausibility.
You are quite right. I thought about mentioning the Cox-Jaynes road to Bayes’ theorem in my post, but decided that someone trying to reconstruct Bayes’ theorem would be more likely to get to it by muddling through intuitively via conditional probability.
It seems to me that stage 3 just means that you use correct scientific methods to learn & expand your knowledge (or am I missing something ?). If that is correct, wouldn’t that mean you could essentially recreate the entire body of human knowledge given enough time & persistence ?
The only knowledge that seems absolutely essential to me then is the scientific method itself. Given my human psychology I’m reasonable certain that without that knowledge I would dream up an entire pantheon of gods to explain away everything and just stop there.
There is a far way from using correct methods to actually discovering something important. There are almost infinitely many ways you can apply the methods, so you have to know where to look to find out the desired answers. Also, “given enough time & persistence” is a phrase which can very easily be misleading. You are certainly not in phase 3 if you needed 10^15 years to discover the relevant fact.
To be in stage 3 with general relativity, to take a particular example, you have to be in the state that after it being deleted from your head, given a question “how to reconcile Lorentz transformations and gravity”, it would instantly appear to you that the solution has something to do with curved spacetime and general covariance. You needn’t to know how the solution looks like at the first moment, but the rederivation should appear to you as the most natural chain of inductions, without stopping at crossroads and randomly (or systematically) checking all possible ways forward, albeit using scientific method.
After all, there were lots of people in 1910s who knew the scientific method and all available data, but only one has discovered general relativity, and only few others, if anybody, were even close.
Actually, Stage 3 works as a standard for the scientific method as well. That is, if knowledge of that specific method were deleted from your mind, would you rediscover it? Do you have an epistemology that would come up with an idea like, “Hey, I need to check these general ideas I have against nature, to see if they really hold” without it having been revealed to you in advance?
Ideally, you’d come up with (or have to start from!) something even better: the Bayesian rationalist method, of which the scientific method is a crippled, special case. While science is better than superstition, it also permits slower updates than you can justify, and often allows certain kinds of evidence that you shouldn’t count.
However, if you found yourself in a role analogous to “being one-eyed in the land of the blind”, and others’ minds weren’t capable of following Bayesian rationality, then you may want to teach them the scientific method as a next-best epistemology.
What if “Bayesian rationality” were deleted?
How did “Bayesian rationality” get discovered, except by the usual practices of scientists? (I won’t say “the scientific method”, partly because it’s really fuzzy and so the “the” at the beginning of the phrase is deceptively concrete, and partly because I don’t think that the process is as tidy as descriptions of the scientific method make it out to be.)
If we’re looking for an error-correcting system, we need to look for a vast number of weak epistemological principles, on the level of “if event X is followed almost immediately by event Y, guess that X is generally followed almost immediately by Y”, along with perceptual details of “how long?” and “what should count as an event?”.
They would probably be fiercely embodied, but that’s not actually a problem—we’re fiercely emphysicsed, after all.
Beyond a certain point, the “regenerate if deleted?” metric becomes useless. For example, if your entire source code is “0″, well, everything’s been deleted, but there’s no way it’s growing back. There has to be somewhere to start. (Related: Where recursive justification hits bottom)
Still, you can characterize epistemic states by how much they could recover, from how deep a deletion, which was one point of the Truly Part of You article. I can imagine simpler epistemic states, lacking knowledge of the scientific method, that could recover Bayesian rationality: you would need to recognize that primitive-future has dynamics very close to primitive-past (where primitive-X denotes the inborn, intuitive understanding of X), which gives you induction, and, combined with basic numeracy, could point you in the right direction.
That was my main problem with the definition of stage 3 and was why I posted my original comment. It seemed to me that you could apply stage 3 to parts of your knowledge but not for everything.
When I read ‘This stage should be the goal of all rationalists.’ (in the original post) I was confused because it seemed to me that stage 3 was unreachable. I mean, if I started with only my human psychology, my senses and the world around me (i.e. the level of a caveman) I don’t think I would invent math, physics,… Stage 3 seemed reachable if I assumed infinite time & persistence and scientific reasoning.
I don’t know about deducing the entire mindset & toolbox of ‘Bayesian rationality,’ but knowing Bayes’ theorem is the key part of it, and I wouldn’t expect that to be too hard to reconstruct if you knew what you look to for.
Bayes’ theorem follows trivially from the definition of conditional probability, and that definition is itself quite intuitive. So in theory, once you have a feel for what probability is, it’d be quite possible to get to Bayes’ theorem. I haven’t read Huygens’ 1657 book on probability theory, but if it was any good, I bet Huygens knew enough about it to beat Bayes to Bayes’ theorem by a century.
Chapters 1 and 2 of Jaynes’ Probability Theory: The Logic of Science show how Bayes’ theorem follows necessarily from certain basic principles of plausible reasoning. In some sense all roads lead to Bayes when trying to derive a consistent mathematical procedure for manipulating degrees of plausibility.
You are quite right. I thought about mentioning the Cox-Jaynes road to Bayes’ theorem in my post, but decided that someone trying to reconstruct Bayes’ theorem would be more likely to get to it by muddling through intuitively via conditional probability.