The thing that comes to mind, when I think of “formidable master of rationality”, is a highly experienced engineer trying to debug problems, especially high-urgency problems that the normal customer support teams haven’t been able to handle. You have a fresh phenomenon, which the creators of the existing product apparently didn’t anticipate (or if they did, they didn’t think it worth adding functionality to handle it), which casts doubt on existing diagnostic systems. You have priors on which tools are likely to still work, priors on which underlying problems are likely to cause which symptoms; tests you can try, each of which has its own cost and range of likely outcomes, and some of which you might invent on the spot; all of these lead to updating your probability distribution over what the underlying problem might be.
Medical diagnostics, as illustrated by Dr. House, can be similar, although I suspect the frequency of “inventing new tests to diagnose a never-before-seen problem” is lower there.
The thing that comes to mind, when I think of “formidable master of rationality”, is a highly experienced engineer trying to debug problems, especially high-urgency problems that the normal customer support teams haven’t been able to handle. You have a fresh phenomenon, which the creators of the existing product apparently didn’t anticipate (or if they did, they didn’t think it worth adding functionality to handle it), which casts doubt on existing diagnostic systems. You have priors on which tools are likely to still work, priors on which underlying problems are likely to cause which symptoms; tests you can try, each of which has its own cost and range of likely outcomes, and some of which you might invent on the spot; all of these lead to updating your probability distribution over what the underlying problem might be.
Medical diagnostics, as illustrated by Dr. House, can be similar, although I suspect the frequency of “inventing new tests to diagnose a never-before-seen problem” is lower there.