With regard to ‘tracking reality with beliefs’ the most important thing I ever noticed afaict is whether or not my beliefs 1. have fewer degrees of freedom than reality and thus have any explanatory power at all and avoid overfitting, 2. vary with reality in a way that is oriented towards causal models/intervention points that can easily be tested (vs abstraction towers).
This seems like a potentially quite helpful concept to me.
I’d be interested in more details of how you go about checking for degrees of freedom.
I think when I do this sort of sanity-checking for myself, things I sometimes do include “wait, why do I believe this in the first place?” and “consider the world where the opposite is true, how would I know?” but those seem like different mental motions.
Easiest is a fictional dialog between a pro and anti position person. The anti person brings counter evidence and then gets to see how the pro position responds. If they respond by remapping the moving parts of the model in a different way, that indicates extra degrees of freedom. Then you can have an easier time noticing when you are doing this same move, ie back peddling and trying to ‘save’ a position when someone gives you push back on it.
This seems like a potentially quite helpful concept to me.
I’d be interested in more details of how you go about checking for degrees of freedom.
I think when I do this sort of sanity-checking for myself, things I sometimes do include “wait, why do I believe this in the first place?” and “consider the world where the opposite is true, how would I know?” but those seem like different mental motions.
Easiest is a fictional dialog between a pro and anti position person. The anti person brings counter evidence and then gets to see how the pro position responds. If they respond by remapping the moving parts of the model in a different way, that indicates extra degrees of freedom. Then you can have an easier time noticing when you are doing this same move, ie back peddling and trying to ‘save’ a position when someone gives you push back on it.