So how can we practice bringing order out of scientific chaos?
It might be that most of us were born too early to become students of the Bayesutsukai, because we’ve already been exposed to too many answers or hints. There’s plenty of existing science that we don’t know, of course, but we’ll never have the experience of discovering evolution ourselves. Maybe we should be training six-year-olds.
We can get some practice on made-up worlds; a bigger version of Zendo. I’m sure this is better than no training, but we are not products of these made-up worlds, so I don’t think it would be as effective for teaching us to be cognitive scientists.
Well, there’s always the HPMOR method: have someone invent a fictional universe (preferably hidden-world fantasy) and have people with a scientific education discover magic and try to understand how it works and how to exploit it.
I looked up zendo on wikipedia and it looks awesome. Is there some way it (or a similar, less visual variant) could be played on the internet among a group of lesswrongers, like the Rationalist Diplomacy games? I could create a number-or-verbal-based version of arbitrary complexity that could be played over IRC or in a thread. I have some time on my hands, so I’ll start on a number based version (using strings of numbers that may or may not have the buddha-nature). Anyone else who is interested in a game, please let me know.
Areas of my expertise: this. There exists a card game called Eleusis, and a simpler variant , Eleusis Express, which are played with standard playing cards and which were purpose-built for precisely this purpose; simulating the scientific method, with emphasis on the non-incremental regimes of scientific progress. These rules can be found here, Express here, and the BoardGameGeek page for the game is here. Expanding this to larger card numbers, etc. should be an easy modification to make, and I would happily do so if there were interest. I can attest that the game is quite fun.
I played a game with strings of numbers here. If you’d like to play another, create an account on the forum and make a thread for it. I’d be happy to play again, it was fun the first time.
Along with zendo, mao might be a good game for practicing—you and the other mao players are scientists, while the grandmaster is the universe’s laws—you can induce the laws either by observing the other “scientists”, or by testing things out (possibly on accident). Jeffreyssai might say this reeks of competition, though—a possible fix would be to have all the “scientists” working on the same team.
So how can we practice bringing order out of scientific chaos?
It might be that most of us were born too early to become students of the Bayesutsukai, because we’ve already been exposed to too many answers or hints. There’s plenty of existing science that we don’t know, of course, but we’ll never have the experience of discovering evolution ourselves. Maybe we should be training six-year-olds.
We can get some practice on made-up worlds; a bigger version of Zendo. I’m sure this is better than no training, but we are not products of these made-up worlds, so I don’t think it would be as effective for teaching us to be cognitive scientists.
Well, there’s always the HPMOR method: have someone invent a fictional universe (preferably hidden-world fantasy) and have people with a scientific education discover magic and try to understand how it works and how to exploit it.
Zendo should be a national sport.
I looked up zendo on wikipedia and it looks awesome. Is there some way it (or a similar, less visual variant) could be played on the internet among a group of lesswrongers, like the Rationalist Diplomacy games? I could create a number-or-verbal-based version of arbitrary complexity that could be played over IRC or in a thread. I have some time on my hands, so I’ll start on a number based version (using strings of numbers that may or may not have the buddha-nature). Anyone else who is interested in a game, please let me know.
Areas of my expertise: this. There exists a card game called Eleusis, and a simpler variant , Eleusis Express, which are played with standard playing cards and which were purpose-built for precisely this purpose; simulating the scientific method, with emphasis on the non-incremental regimes of scientific progress. These rules can be found here, Express here, and the BoardGameGeek page for the game is here. Expanding this to larger card numbers, etc. should be an easy modification to make, and I would happily do so if there were interest. I can attest that the game is quite fun.
Did you ever get anywhere with this? I’d love to work on such a game. You can contact me via the same handle on twitter or @gmail.com.
I played a game with strings of numbers here. If you’d like to play another, create an account on the forum and make a thread for it. I’d be happy to play again, it was fun the first time.
Along with zendo, mao might be a good game for practicing—you and the other mao players are scientists, while the grandmaster is the universe’s laws—you can induce the laws either by observing the other “scientists”, or by testing things out (possibly on accident). Jeffreyssai might say this reeks of competition, though—a possible fix would be to have all the “scientists” working on the same team.