“Sorry, you’re not allowed to suggest ideas using that method” is not something you hear, under Traditional Rationality.
But it is a fact of life, ….
It is a fact of life that ….
I disagree. You list a whole collection of mistakes people make after they have a bad hypothesis that they’re attached to. I say, the mistake should not be to use your prior experience when you come up with hypotheses. The mistakes are first to get too attached to one hypothesis, followed by the list of “facts of life” mistakes you then described.
People will get hypotheses from whatever source. Telling them they shouldn’t have done it is like telling a jury to completely ignore evidence that they should not have been exposed to. Very hard commands to obey.
What’s needed is a new skill. In mathematics, I found it useful when I had trouble proving a theorem to try to disprove it instead. The places I had trouble with the theorem gave great hints toward building a counterexample. Then if the counterexample kept running into problems, the kind of problems it ran into gave great hints toward how to solve the theorem. Then if I still couldn’t prove it, the problems pointed toward a better counterexample, and so on.
So for things like evolutionary questions, once you have an idea about a way that evolution might work to get a particular result, the needed skill might be to look for any way that other genes could be selected while subverting that process. If you can be honest enough that you see it’s easy for it to fail and hard for it to succeed, then the proposed mechanism gets a lot easier to reject.
This logic applied to SDI, for example. The argument wasn’t whether we could build the advanced technology required to shoot down an ICBM. The argument was whether we could improve SDI as fast as our potential enemies could improve their SDI-blocking methods. And we clearly could not.
The question isn’t “Can it work?”. The question is “Can it outcompete all comers?”. Group selection advocates got caught up in the question whether there are circumstances that allow group selection. Yes, there are. It can happen. But then there’s the question how often those circumstances show up, and currently the answer looks like “rarely”.
“Sorry, you’re not allowed to suggest ideas using that method” is not something you hear, under Traditional Rationality.
But it is a fact of life, ….
It is a fact of life that ….
I disagree. You list a whole collection of mistakes people make after they have a bad hypothesis that they’re attached to. I say, the mistake should not be to use your prior experience when you come up with hypotheses. The mistakes are first to get too attached to one hypothesis, followed by the list of “facts of life” mistakes you then described.
People will get hypotheses from whatever source. Telling them they shouldn’t have done it is like telling a jury to completely ignore evidence that they should not have been exposed to. Very hard commands to obey.
What’s needed is a new skill. In mathematics, I found it useful when I had trouble proving a theorem to try to disprove it instead. The places I had trouble with the theorem gave great hints toward building a counterexample. Then if the counterexample kept running into problems, the kind of problems it ran into gave great hints toward how to solve the theorem. Then if I still couldn’t prove it, the problems pointed toward a better counterexample, and so on.
So for things like evolutionary questions, once you have an idea about a way that evolution might work to get a particular result, the needed skill might be to look for any way that other genes could be selected while subverting that process. If you can be honest enough that you see it’s easy for it to fail and hard for it to succeed, then the proposed mechanism gets a lot easier to reject.
This logic applied to SDI, for example. The argument wasn’t whether we could build the advanced technology required to shoot down an ICBM. The argument was whether we could improve SDI as fast as our potential enemies could improve their SDI-blocking methods. And we clearly could not.
The question isn’t “Can it work?”. The question is “Can it outcompete all comers?”. Group selection advocates got caught up in the question whether there are circumstances that allow group selection. Yes, there are. It can happen. But then there’s the question how often those circumstances show up, and currently the answer looks like “rarely”.