if you mention the disconnect between what people are saying and what they are doing, they get upset and angry at you challenging their self-conception
I wonder if the reason why science has been somewhat successful at finding things out about the world is because it is divorced from trying to do things.
The idealised scientist never promises to make a certain thing or find the most important thing, they promise to investigate a thing. And that investigation shows that the thing can’t be made or the hoped for thing isn’t there, that is progress has been made and a worthwhile thing has occurred.
An individuals scientists identity is not wrapped up having an impact in the world over and above searching that little bit of hypothesis space.
This idealised science person does not occur too much, but I think what science has achieved has been due to this separation of concerns of thinking/doing.
We can’t search everywhere or science everything. We need a way for questions to be prioritized. But then if people champion a specific question and it was not a useful question they would be invested in that question and we would be back in the same situation.
Perhaps we need a collective anonymous way to vote for the questions we want answering.
When we have a good accurate model of the problem then courses of actions could need be unanimous?
I wonder if the reason why science has been somewhat successful at finding things out about the world is because it is divorced from trying to do things.
The idealised scientist never promises to make a certain thing or find the most important thing, they promise to investigate a thing. And that investigation shows that the thing can’t be made or the hoped for thing isn’t there, that is progress has been made and a worthwhile thing has occurred.
An individuals scientists identity is not wrapped up having an impact in the world over and above searching that little bit of hypothesis space.
This idealised science person does not occur too much, but I think what science has achieved has been due to this separation of concerns of thinking/doing.
We can’t search everywhere or science everything. We need a way for questions to be prioritized. But then if people champion a specific question and it was not a useful question they would be invested in that question and we would be back in the same situation.
Perhaps we need a collective anonymous way to vote for the questions we want answering.
When we have a good accurate model of the problem then courses of actions could need be unanimous?
Yeah. This feels like the useful-division-of-labor between the Rationality community and the Effective Altruism community.