My understanding of MC is “I want this to be true, so I’ll believe it is and act accordingly”. There are many schools of thought that go this route (witchcraft, law of attraction etc.) This has obvious failure modes and tends to have suboptimal results, if your goal is to actually impose your will upon the world. Which is why I’m initially skeptical to MC.
You seem to have a more idiosyncratic usage of MC, where you’ve put a lot of thought into it and have gone into regions which are unknown to the common man. Sort of like you’re waving from the other side of a canyon saying how nice it is there, but all I can see is the chasm under my feet. There is a similar problem with “Rationality” meaning different things to different people at different times in history, which can result in very frustrating conversations.
Classic understanding of MC: “motivation = truth”. My understanding of MC: “motivations + facts = truth”. (See.)
Yes, my understanding of MC is “unusual”. But I think it’s fair:
Classic understanding always was flawed. Because it always covered just a small part of MC. (See.) You don’t need my ideas to see it.
You can say my understanding is natural: it’s what you get when you treat MC seriously or try to steelman it. And if we never even tried to steelman MC—that’s on us.
People get criticized for all kinds of MC or “MC-looking” styles of thinking. E.g. for politics. Not only for witchcraft. My definition may be unusual, but it describes an already existing phenomenon.
So it’s not that I cooked up a thing which never existed before in any way and slapped a familiar name on it.
Could you try tabooing MC?
Some ideas from the post: (most of them from here)
MC is a way to fill the gaps of informal arguments.
MC is a way to choose definitions of concepts. Decide what definitions are more important.
MC is a way to tie abstract labels to real things. Which is needed in order to apply formal logic or calculate probabilities. (See.)
MC is a way to “turn Bayesianism inside-out”. (I don’t know math, so I can’t check it precisely.) You get MC if you try to model reality as a single fuzzy event. (See.) This fuzzy event becomes your “motivation” and you update it and its usage based on facts.
MC is a way to add additional parameters to “truth” and “simplicity” (when you can’t estimate those directly).
We can explore those. I can analyze an argument in some of those terms (definitions, labels vs. real things and etc.).
My understanding of MC is “I want this to be true, so I’ll believe it is and act accordingly”. There are many schools of thought that go this route (witchcraft, law of attraction etc.) This has obvious failure modes and tends to have suboptimal results, if your goal is to actually impose your will upon the world. Which is why I’m initially skeptical to MC.
You seem to have a more idiosyncratic usage of MC, where you’ve put a lot of thought into it and have gone into regions which are unknown to the common man. Sort of like you’re waving from the other side of a canyon saying how nice it is there, but all I can see is the chasm under my feet. There is a similar problem with “Rationality” meaning different things to different people at different times in history, which can result in very frustrating conversations.
Could you try tabooing MC?
Classic understanding of MC: “motivation = truth”. My understanding of MC: “motivations + facts = truth”. (See.)
Yes, my understanding of MC is “unusual”. But I think it’s fair:
Classic understanding always was flawed. Because it always covered just a small part of MC. (See.) You don’t need my ideas to see it.
You can say my understanding is natural: it’s what you get when you treat MC seriously or try to steelman it. And if we never even tried to steelman MC—that’s on us.
People get criticized for all kinds of MC or “MC-looking” styles of thinking. E.g. for politics. Not only for witchcraft. My definition may be unusual, but it describes an already existing phenomenon.
So it’s not that I cooked up a thing which never existed before in any way and slapped a familiar name on it.
Some ideas from the post: (most of them from here)
MC is a way to fill the gaps of informal arguments.
MC is a way to choose definitions of concepts. Decide what definitions are more important.
MC is a way to tie abstract labels to real things. Which is needed in order to apply formal logic or calculate probabilities. (See.)
MC is a way to “turn Bayesianism inside-out”. (I don’t know math, so I can’t check it precisely.) You get MC if you try to model reality as a single fuzzy event. (See.) This fuzzy event becomes your “motivation” and you update it and its usage based on facts.
MC is a way to add additional parameters to “truth” and “simplicity” (when you can’t estimate those directly).
We can explore those. I can analyze an argument in some of those terms (definitions, labels vs. real things and etc.).