I notice that the most value I got from your essay is a reminder of the core principles of naturalism, and an indicator / reminder that just observing is enough to make a significant amount of good things happen.
I did get confused when reading the first half of this essay, because I still don’t know what it means to “hug the query”. I could try to put it into words (“prefer more direct and strong evidence that reduces inferential distance, which makes your inference more robust to errors”) but I don’t have a felt-sense of what this would mean and no concrete examples come to mind immediately.
Reading your example, I feel like this didn″t match my felt-sense for what “hugging the query” seems to me (even as I was writing this line!), and after I spent a minute or so verifying this, I felt like I couldn’t point out any way where this didn’t make sense as an example of “hugging the query”. Hugging the query, to me, feels like burning the hedge down, or trying to walk around the maze instead of solving it, or cutting through walls if I ever hit a dead end. I guess to me the ‘anchor’ is the endpoint in my head due how I envision the maze as a hedge maze. Imagining more restricted examples of mazes feels claustrophobic and makes my mind anchor on potential reasons for why I’m in such a maze, instead of trying to simply solve the maze, which is quite interesting! As far as I can tell, what I seem to be feeling here is another instance of what it seems to me to feel like to apply reduction to problems.
I have not done that work. I do not have PCK on this, and so I cannot tell you a straighter or easier path than the entire self-directed naturalist method itself.
Yes, it seems likely to me that a lot of rationalist skills cannot be easily taught in a standardized format. One-on-one teaching sessions work a lot better, with a teacher who understands to sort-of debug the student as they apply the skill, fail, notice interesting things, and refine their understanding of the art. The example that comes to mind is learning how to write math proofs.
I notice that the most value I got from your essay is a reminder of the core principles of naturalism, and an indicator / reminder that just observing is enough to make a significant amount of good things happen.
I did get confused when reading the first half of this essay, because I still don’t know what it means to “hug the query”. I could try to put it into words (“prefer more direct and strong evidence that reduces inferential distance, which makes your inference more robust to errors”) but I don’t have a felt-sense of what this would mean and no concrete examples come to mind immediately.
Reading your example, I feel like this didn″t match my felt-sense for what “hugging the query” seems to me (even as I was writing this line!), and after I spent a minute or so verifying this, I felt like I couldn’t point out any way where this didn’t make sense as an example of “hugging the query”. Hugging the query, to me, feels like burning the hedge down, or trying to walk around the maze instead of solving it, or cutting through walls if I ever hit a dead end. I guess to me the ‘anchor’ is the endpoint in my head due how I envision the maze as a hedge maze. Imagining more restricted examples of mazes feels claustrophobic and makes my mind anchor on potential reasons for why I’m in such a maze, instead of trying to simply solve the maze, which is quite interesting! As far as I can tell, what I seem to be feeling here is another instance of what it seems to me to feel like to apply reduction to problems.
Yes, it seems likely to me that a lot of rationalist skills cannot be easily taught in a standardized format. One-on-one teaching sessions work a lot better, with a teacher who understands to sort-of debug the student as they apply the skill, fail, notice interesting things, and refine their understanding of the art. The example that comes to mind is learning how to write math proofs.
I’m looking forward to your next essay.