Just letting you know that after a couple days of thinking about it, I’ve completely come around to your point of view. Figuring out the next best hypothesis that explains all your current data is a much more general approach. It covers so many cases that I even thought of it as the “key to rationality” for a few hours.
I agree, it is the key to rationality. :) I got the idea from Heuer’s CIA debiasing guide, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Or rather, from someone at a LW meetup who got it from that guide. An older source is the essay The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses. Both sources give more detail on the breadth of this idea.
Just letting you know that after a couple days of thinking about it, I’ve completely come around to your point of view. Figuring out the next best hypothesis that explains all your current data is a much more general approach. It covers so many cases that I even thought of it as the “key to rationality” for a few hours.
I agree, it is the key to rationality. :) I got the idea from Heuer’s CIA debiasing guide, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Or rather, from someone at a LW meetup who got it from that guide. An older source is the essay The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses. Both sources give more detail on the breadth of this idea.
Maybe we should have a post spelling out how much of rationality is covered by this. It’s not widely understood here.