I notice that my explanation of MC failed somewhere (you’re the second person to tell me). So, could you expand on that?
Or that there are too many layers of inference between us.
Maybe we just have different interests or “commitments” to those interests. For example:
I’m “a priori” interested in anything that combines motivations and facts. (Explained here why.)
I’m interested in high-level argumentation. I notice that Bayesianism doesn’t model it much (or any high-level reasoning).
Bayesianism often criticizes MC and if MC were true it would be a big hit to Bayesianism. So, the topic of MC is naturally interesting.
If you’re “committed” to those interests, you don’t react like “I haven’t understood this post about MC”, you react more like “I have my own thoughts about MC. This post differs from them. Why?” or “I tried to think about MC myself, but I hit the wall. This post claims to make progress. I don’t understand—how?”—i.e. because of the commitment you already have thoughts about the topic or interpret the topic through the lens “I should’ve thought about this myself”.
My current understanding is that you’re trying to say something like “optimism and imagination are good because they help you push through in interesting directions, rather than just stopping at the cold wall of logic”.
Yes, this is one of the usages of optimism (for imagination). But we need commitments to some “philosophical” or conflicting topics to make this interesting. If you’re not “a priori” interested in the topic of optimism, then you can just say “optimism for imagination? sure, but I can use anything else for imagination too”. Any idea requires an anchor to an already existing topic or a conflict in order to be interesting. Without such anchors a summary of any idea is going to sound empty. (On the meta level, this is one of my arguments for MC: it allows you to perceive information with more conflict, with more anchors.)
Also, maybe your description excludes the possibility that MC could actually work for predictions. I think it’s important to not exclude this possibility (even if we think it’s false) in order to study MC in the most principled way.
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.).
I notice that my explanation of MC failed somewhere (you’re the second person to tell me). So, could you expand on that?
Maybe we just have different interests or “commitments” to those interests. For example:
I’m “a priori” interested in anything that combines motivations and facts. (Explained here why.)
I’m interested in high-level argumentation. I notice that Bayesianism doesn’t model it much (or any high-level reasoning).
Bayesianism often criticizes MC and if MC were true it would be a big hit to Bayesianism. So, the topic of MC is naturally interesting.
If you’re “committed” to those interests, you don’t react like “I haven’t understood this post about MC”, you react more like “I have my own thoughts about MC. This post differs from them. Why?” or “I tried to think about MC myself, but I hit the wall. This post claims to make progress. I don’t understand—how?”—i.e. because of the commitment you already have thoughts about the topic or interpret the topic through the lens “I should’ve thought about this myself”.
Yes, this is one of the usages of optimism (for imagination). But we need commitments to some “philosophical” or conflicting topics to make this interesting. If you’re not “a priori” interested in the topic of optimism, then you can just say “optimism for imagination? sure, but I can use anything else for imagination too”. Any idea requires an anchor to an already existing topic or a conflict in order to be interesting. Without such anchors a summary of any idea is going to sound empty. (On the meta level, this is one of my arguments for MC: it allows you to perceive information with more conflict, with more anchors.)
Also, maybe your description excludes the possibility that MC could actually work for predictions. I think it’s important to not exclude this possibility (even if we think it’s false) in order to study MC in the most principled way.
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.).