The phrase “Given a question” skips what may be the most important (meta-)question:
Q: For what questions should we try to find answers, spending how much effort on each?
For so many mistakes that people make, the failure isn’t that they would come up with the wrong answer to a simple decisive question, the failure is that they didn’t think to ask the right question. Sometimes problems look easier in hindsight because of a bias, but sometimes solving the problem really is easy, but the hard part is realizing before it’s too late that the problem exists.
Yes, I agree that these are important questions. I think I would break your question up into two:
Q: How can we find good questions to think about?
Q: When should we stop thinking about a question?
Now, I must confess, I’m a fan of the root question that I’ve already come up with. But after I think about it some, I begin to think it may make sense to ask multiple root questions, all of them fully general, and all referring to each other. The problem of rationality can be looked at in different ways, and I imagine these ways can complement each other.
NTS: the “apply a correction, test, repeat” algorithm may make a good root question.
The phrase “Given a question” skips what may be the most important (meta-)question:
Q: For what questions should we try to find answers, spending how much effort on each?
For so many mistakes that people make, the failure isn’t that they would come up with the wrong answer to a simple decisive question, the failure is that they didn’t think to ask the right question. Sometimes problems look easier in hindsight because of a bias, but sometimes solving the problem really is easy, but the hard part is realizing before it’s too late that the problem exists.
Yes, I agree that these are important questions. I think I would break your question up into two:
Q: How can we find good questions to think about?
Q: When should we stop thinking about a question?
Now, I must confess, I’m a fan of the root question that I’ve already come up with. But after I think about it some, I begin to think it may make sense to ask multiple root questions, all of them fully general, and all referring to each other. The problem of rationality can be looked at in different ways, and I imagine these ways can complement each other.
NTS: the “apply a correction, test, repeat” algorithm may make a good root question.