It turns out, the question of what I will believe now came up much sooner than anticipated, and I have a long written follow-up to report. If it seems that this would stand better as its own post, tell me.
After school today, I stopped at home briefly to empty my backpack and then head out to the grocery store in order to pick up some drinks, and in order to take the time to walk and think. My friend had confessed to me that they were caught in an anxiety spiral, fearing that they might be a burden on me by tending to approach me when they were in need of help, and asked me to help them unpack why they were prone to this kind of problem. I had given them some quick emotional reassurances and promised to try to address their concerns more thoroughly later.
I was thinking about that, trying to compose in my head a further reassurance that might help alleviate their anxiety about imposing costs on me, an anxiety I know far too well, by explaining the benefits that come along with it. I was thinking in terms of a ‘prison’ scenario I’d written about which I knew they had already read, and also in terms of some symbols from HPMoR which I also knew they had already read. One of the comparisons I had thought of that I was particularly happy with was to compare the comfort I get out of being able to actually help them to the healing effect of the song of the phoenix, and I had also considered other phoenix-imagery, like the way it makes me feel strong to be there for them filling me with phoenix fire.
I paused, at about this point, and looked up for a moment to decide where I was walking. I had turned down a road that I could follow to a grocery store I liked to shop at, but I had also already passed the grocery I usually shop at. I took a brief moment to measure how much I wanted to keep walking, against how much I wanted to get home faster and start writing down my explanations to give to my friend. After a moment of indecision, I turned back the way I had come and progressed towards the store I had already passed.
There was one intersection I had to cross to get there, and at that intersection I encountered a man, a woman and a very big dog, who seemed friendly. I was in a good mood, and held out my hand cautiously to the dog, who didn’t immediately seem to take an interest.
“May I pat him?” I asked.
“Sure,” the man said, and I did. Then, “Sit down, Phoenix.”
...
“His name is Phoenix?”
“Yep, Phoenix is his name.”
“I… was just thinking about phoenixes,” I told him with an awkward little smile, and patted the dog for a moment more, before my light turned green and I crossed the road.
A part of me turned to me and asked myself,
Am I allowed to start counting that as evidence yet?
I will from this point call this internal voice Serp1, and distinguish it from a second voice, Serp2.
Serp2: Um… I don’t know.
This next part of the conversation (indented) was not actually expressed in words, but I will do my best to translate it accurately into them.
Serp2: I went through all that work to distance myself from the mysticism thing. I don’t want to give that all away.
Serp1: You want to hold onto the points you’ve earned with your rationalist friends for coming to a conclusion that looks rational, and sticking to it. I understand that, but that wasn’t what we agreed to. Our analysis and genuine challenge of mysticism was undertaken to seek truth, and that means weighing and judging the evidence FOR mysticism as well as the evidence against it. We agreed to start fresh and ignore past evidence, but we are not just walking away from this entire question as though it doesn’t matter to us. And we are especially not doing it to conform to an in-group.
Serp2: It hasn’t even been one full day since I actually published that post!
Serp1: Yeah. It kind of sucks that we didn’t have more time to practice looking at the world assuming the null hypothesis first, but I am not going to sit by and let you ignore what just happened if it’s legitimate evidence that ought to inform our beliefs.
Serp2: Okay fine. Let me think about this...
Serp2: Alright. What just happened does seem like it should be a piece of evidence, the way I understand it. Weak evidence, that could have happened in a world with no magic, but it seems much less likely that it would.
Oh, geez. Now what am I supposed to do with that again?
… There’s a neat little feeling that I observed here, which reminds me of this quote: “Her mind skipped gears, ground against itself, and spat back the instructions for doing a science investigation project” (Hermione being tested, HPMoR chapter 8). That is an almost perfect description of it. A feeling of cognitive drain, and then a result popping out.
Serp2: We’re supposed to try to predict the priors of that happening in the case of a world without magic. Ummm… How the hell do I quantify that?
[Cognitive drain, memory search result.]
Serp1: What are the odds of an observation that would seem at least that weird in a way that seems to suggest that reality is responding to my thoughts, or my thoughts are responding to reality, without recourse to any of the normal, reasonable modes of entanglement, arising just as background noise? What are the chances of seeing an event that favours the mysticism hypothesis as much as this one does?
Serp2: Buh. I don’t know… One in twenty? No… I can’t put a useful number to it, the question isn’t bounded enough. One in twenty what, random things I think about? In that case it would be happening all the time. And I’m just pulling a number out of my ass anyway. The number doesn’t really mean anything. My actual assessment, my gut-check, is that it seems very unlikely for that to happen as a result of pure background coincidence. It seems unlikely enough that it felt uncanny, like getting a sideways glimpse of a little light showing between the seams of the universe. Not the kind of coincidence I can easily shrug off.
Serp2, a little bit pointedly: Unlikely enough that it’s pushing me into this confrontation with myself even though I didn’t want to have it yet.
Serp1: We’ll just have to accept that as an answer for now. What next?
[Cognitive drain, memory search result.]
Serp2: Quantify the amount more likely it should be to see this result under the mysticism hypothesis. I don’t know how to put numbers to that, either, and even if I did, my ass is not well enough calibrated at the moment that my numbers would be likely to mean anything.
Serp1: We have a notebook in our backpack, don’t we? We can actually write this down. We don’t need to actually assign the numbers right now, just make a list of all the factors that we would want to assign numbers to.
Serp2: That… sounds like a great idea actually. It’s an almost completely fresh notebook, too. I could try to keep a record of all the things that register as potentially important evidence regarding whether or not to believe in mysticism, right here in this special book. As long as I capture the essential points, assigning numbers to them should be something I can do later...
And so I paused in my grocery shopping, and took out my notebook, and I wrote down the following list and notes (expanded a bit out of point form for better clarity):
(+ factor supports mysticism; - factor limits impact of support)
April 6
A Dog Named Phoenix
: + the observation followed the thought, with a delay of about 1-2 minutes, max, between them
: + the same word, Phoenix, was fully and specifically articulated in both
: + observation was preceded by and depended on an unanticipated, sudden and whimsical change of plans (I would not have met the dog if I had not paused to choose my path and decided to turn around)
: - Phoenix is not an especially unlikely name for a dog to have
: - questioning my mysticism and thinking about it a lot within the last day is something that might elicit a confirming response under the mysticism hypothesis, but, I am not permitting it to add evidential weight, because questioning mysticism and the nature of reality is not a particularly unusual state of mind for me to be in
Note: it will be harder to collect negative evidential results effectively. BEWARE POSITIVITY BIAS!
Set Requirement: must establish decent success rate when ACTUALLY LOOKING, in order to count, permit and track negative results.
By that I mean, in order for the mysticism hypothesis to earn back a status resembling or surpassing its former privilege, it isn’t enough to notice surprising positive results where I hadn’t been expecting to see them crop up. I will need to actually take steps in which I intentionally try to evoke it, and see it work then, while also tracking any attempts I make to evoke it that fail. Deciding what kind of success rate qualifies as “decent” is a complicated affair I will have to address later. This has already been a lot of writing, and I still have a friend to help.
However… as I put my notebook back in my bag and turned for home, I felt… proud. I think this is the right approach. I’m not being cowed or awed by my ignorance, I’m… I’m actually constructing ways of doing research on magic. And finally practicing the methods myself. Cool.
Also, I consider the phrase “making beliefs pay rent” and I find myself feeling that I have just handed this belief an eviction notice… but a conditional one. A warning to either pay up or get out, but I’m open to either one.
It turns out, the question of what I will believe now came up much sooner than anticipated, and I have a long written follow-up to report. If it seems that this would stand better as its own post, tell me.
After school today, I stopped at home briefly to empty my backpack and then head out to the grocery store in order to pick up some drinks, and in order to take the time to walk and think. My friend had confessed to me that they were caught in an anxiety spiral, fearing that they might be a burden on me by tending to approach me when they were in need of help, and asked me to help them unpack why they were prone to this kind of problem. I had given them some quick emotional reassurances and promised to try to address their concerns more thoroughly later.
I was thinking about that, trying to compose in my head a further reassurance that might help alleviate their anxiety about imposing costs on me, an anxiety I know far too well, by explaining the benefits that come along with it. I was thinking in terms of a ‘prison’ scenario I’d written about which I knew they had already read, and also in terms of some symbols from HPMoR which I also knew they had already read. One of the comparisons I had thought of that I was particularly happy with was to compare the comfort I get out of being able to actually help them to the healing effect of the song of the phoenix, and I had also considered other phoenix-imagery, like the way it makes me feel strong to be there for them filling me with phoenix fire.
I paused, at about this point, and looked up for a moment to decide where I was walking. I had turned down a road that I could follow to a grocery store I liked to shop at, but I had also already passed the grocery I usually shop at. I took a brief moment to measure how much I wanted to keep walking, against how much I wanted to get home faster and start writing down my explanations to give to my friend. After a moment of indecision, I turned back the way I had come and progressed towards the store I had already passed.
There was one intersection I had to cross to get there, and at that intersection I encountered a man, a woman and a very big dog, who seemed friendly. I was in a good mood, and held out my hand cautiously to the dog, who didn’t immediately seem to take an interest.
“May I pat him?” I asked.
“Sure,” the man said, and I did. Then, “Sit down, Phoenix.”
...
“His name is Phoenix?”
“Yep, Phoenix is his name.”
“I… was just thinking about phoenixes,” I told him with an awkward little smile, and patted the dog for a moment more, before my light turned green and I crossed the road.
A part of me turned to me and asked myself,
Am I allowed to start counting that as evidence yet?
I will from this point call this internal voice Serp1, and distinguish it from a second voice, Serp2.
Serp2: Um… I don’t know.
This next part of the conversation (indented) was not actually expressed in words, but I will do my best to translate it accurately into them.
Serp2: Okay fine. Let me think about this...
Serp2: Alright. What just happened does seem like it should be a piece of evidence, the way I understand it. Weak evidence, that could have happened in a world with no magic, but it seems much less likely that it would.
Oh, geez. Now what am I supposed to do with that again?
… There’s a neat little feeling that I observed here, which reminds me of this quote: “Her mind skipped gears, ground against itself, and spat back the instructions for doing a science investigation project” (Hermione being tested, HPMoR chapter 8). That is an almost perfect description of it. A feeling of cognitive drain, and then a result popping out.
Serp2: We’re supposed to try to predict the priors of that happening in the case of a world without magic. Ummm… How the hell do I quantify that?
[Cognitive drain, memory search result.]
Serp1: What are the odds of an observation that would seem at least that weird in a way that seems to suggest that reality is responding to my thoughts, or my thoughts are responding to reality, without recourse to any of the normal, reasonable modes of entanglement, arising just as background noise? What are the chances of seeing an event that favours the mysticism hypothesis as much as this one does?
Serp2: Buh. I don’t know… One in twenty? No… I can’t put a useful number to it, the question isn’t bounded enough. One in twenty what, random things I think about? In that case it would be happening all the time. And I’m just pulling a number out of my ass anyway. The number doesn’t really mean anything. My actual assessment, my gut-check, is that it seems very unlikely for that to happen as a result of pure background coincidence. It seems unlikely enough that it felt uncanny, like getting a sideways glimpse of a little light showing between the seams of the universe. Not the kind of coincidence I can easily shrug off.
Serp2, a little bit pointedly: Unlikely enough that it’s pushing me into this confrontation with myself even though I didn’t want to have it yet.
Serp1: We’ll just have to accept that as an answer for now. What next?
[Cognitive drain, memory search result.]
Serp2: Quantify the amount more likely it should be to see this result under the mysticism hypothesis. I don’t know how to put numbers to that, either, and even if I did, my ass is not well enough calibrated at the moment that my numbers would be likely to mean anything.
Serp1: Crap. Well, what do we do now then?
[Cognitive drain, memory search result.]
“Lady Rationality carries a notebook. She writes down all the evidence, not just the evidence for or against one side...”
Serp1: We have a notebook in our backpack, don’t we? We can actually write this down. We don’t need to actually assign the numbers right now, just make a list of all the factors that we would want to assign numbers to.
Serp2: That… sounds like a great idea actually. It’s an almost completely fresh notebook, too. I could try to keep a record of all the things that register as potentially important evidence regarding whether or not to believe in mysticism, right here in this special book. As long as I capture the essential points, assigning numbers to them should be something I can do later...
And so I paused in my grocery shopping, and took out my notebook, and I wrote down the following list and notes (expanded a bit out of point form for better clarity):
(+ factor supports mysticism; - factor limits impact of support)
April 6
A Dog Named Phoenix
: + the observation followed the thought, with a delay of about 1-2 minutes, max, between them
: + the same word, Phoenix, was fully and specifically articulated in both
: + observation was preceded by and depended on an unanticipated, sudden and whimsical change of plans (I would not have met the dog if I had not paused to choose my path and decided to turn around)
: - Phoenix is not an especially unlikely name for a dog to have
: - questioning my mysticism and thinking about it a lot within the last day is something that might elicit a confirming response under the mysticism hypothesis, but, I am not permitting it to add evidential weight, because questioning mysticism and the nature of reality is not a particularly unusual state of mind for me to be in
Note: it will be harder to collect negative evidential results effectively. BEWARE POSITIVITY BIAS!
Set Requirement: must establish decent success rate when ACTUALLY LOOKING, in order to count, permit and track negative results.
By that I mean, in order for the mysticism hypothesis to earn back a status resembling or surpassing its former privilege, it isn’t enough to notice surprising positive results where I hadn’t been expecting to see them crop up. I will need to actually take steps in which I intentionally try to evoke it, and see it work then, while also tracking any attempts I make to evoke it that fail. Deciding what kind of success rate qualifies as “decent” is a complicated affair I will have to address later. This has already been a lot of writing, and I still have a friend to help.
However… as I put my notebook back in my bag and turned for home, I felt… proud. I think this is the right approach. I’m not being cowed or awed by my ignorance, I’m… I’m actually constructing ways of doing research on magic. And finally practicing the methods myself. Cool.
Also, I consider the phrase “making beliefs pay rent” and I find myself feeling that I have just handed this belief an eviction notice… but a conditional one. A warning to either pay up or get out, but I’m open to either one.