I agree with the terms, for the sake of explanation by magical thinker I was thinking along the lines of young non science trained children, or people who have either no knowledge of or no interest in the scientific method. Ancient Greek philosophers could come under this label if they never experimented to test their ideas. The essence is that they theorise without testing their theory.
In terms of the task, my first idea was the marshmallow test from a Ted lecture, “make the highest tower you can that will support a marshmallow on top from dry spaghetti, a yard of string, and a yard of tape.”
Essentially a situation where the results are clearly comparable, but the way to get the best result is hard to prove. So far triangles are the way to go, but there may be a better way that nobody has tried yet. If the task has a time limit, is it worth using scientific or bayesian principles to design the tower or is it better to just start taping some pasta.
At the risk of repeating myself… it depends on the properties of the marshmallow-test task. If it is such that my intuitions about it predict the actual task pretty well, then I should just start taping pasta. If it is such that my intuitions about it predict the task poorly, I might do better to study the system… although if there’s a time limit, that might not be a good idea either, depending on the time limit and how quickly I study.
I agree with the terms, for the sake of explanation by magical thinker I was thinking along the lines of young non science trained children, or people who have either no knowledge of or no interest in the scientific method. Ancient Greek philosophers could come under this label if they never experimented to test their ideas. The essence is that they theorise without testing their theory.
In terms of the task, my first idea was the marshmallow test from a Ted lecture, “make the highest tower you can that will support a marshmallow on top from dry spaghetti, a yard of string, and a yard of tape.”
Essentially a situation where the results are clearly comparable, but the way to get the best result is hard to prove. So far triangles are the way to go, but there may be a better way that nobody has tried yet. If the task has a time limit, is it worth using scientific or bayesian principles to design the tower or is it better to just start taping some pasta.
At the risk of repeating myself… it depends on the properties of the marshmallow-test task. If it is such that my intuitions about it predict the actual task pretty well, then I should just start taping pasta. If it is such that my intuitions about it predict the task poorly, I might do better to study the system… although if there’s a time limit, that might not be a good idea either, depending on the time limit and how quickly I study.