What you are describing is my native way of thinking. My mind fits large amounts of information together into an aesthetic whole. I took me a while to figure out that other people don’t think this way, and they can’t easily just absorb patterns from evidence.
This mode of thinking has been described as Introverted Thinking in Ben Kovitz’s obscure psychology wiki about Lenore Thomson’s obscure take on Jungian psychology. Some of you are familiar with Jungian functions through MBTI, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Introverted Thinking (abbreviated Ti) is the dominant function of the INTP type.
It will only take a few quotes to illustrate why you are talking about the same thing:
Introverted Thinking (Ti) is the attitude that beneath the complexity of what is manifest (apparent, observed, experienced) there is an underlying unity: a source or essence that emerges and takes form in different ways depending on circumstances. What is manifest is seen as a manifestation of something. From a Ti standpoint, the way to respond to things is in a way that is faithful to that underlying cause or source and helps it emerge fully and complete, without interference from any notion of self. The way to understand that underlying essence is to learn to simultaneously see many relationships within what is manifest, to see every element in relation to every other element, the relationships being the “signature” of the underlying unity. This can only be experienced directly, not second-hand.
Introverted thinking is a form of mental representation in which every input, every variable, every aspect of things is considered simultaneously and holistically to perceive causal, mathematical, and aesthetic order. What you know by Ti, you know with your hands, your eyes, your muscles, even a tingling sensation “downstairs” because you sense that everything fits. Every variable is fair game to vary, every combination of variables worthy of consideration; the only ultimate arbiter is how well the parts form a unified whole rather than a jumble.
Introverted Thinking (Ti) is contrasted with Extraverted Thinking (Te):
From the Te perspective, anything for which you can’t give an operational definition in terms of measurement (an “objective test”) doesn’t exist. The decision criteria are defined not exactly in terms of the things: they’re defined in terms of observations of a sort that anyone can do and get the same result. You put the totality of the real-world situation onto your scales, so that all causal factors come into play—both known and unknown. What’s accessible to you is the reading on the scale: that and only that is the basis for your decision.
As a dominant function, Te typically leads one to pursue and collect reliable ways of making decisions to get predictable results. The repeatability of a process becomes one of the main criteria for finding it valuable. Repeatable processes are valuable from a Te perspective because they enable you to make agreements with other people, where there is no doubt as to whether each party has fulfilled its part of the agreement. Making and delivering on promises is often how a Te attitude leads one to understand ethics.
Introverted Thinking about language:
From the Ti standpoint, communication is possible only between people who share some common experience of the things that they’re talking about. To say something that you can understand, I need to relate it logically to things in your own experience. To show you how far a piece of wood bends, instead of giving a numerical measure (Te), I’d either encourage you to bend a piece of wood yourself, or find some mathematically similar thing that you know about and relate wood-bending to that. Words cannot be defined prior to the reality that they’re about; words and criteria defined independently of the reality would be meaningless. The world itself provides a natural set of reference points, arising from the real, causal structure of things. Ultimately, to talk is to say, “I mean *that).”
Introverted Thinking uses language and concepts merely as pointers to patterns in reality that are incredibly more complex than anything that can be described in words. In contrast, Extraverted Thinking is about step-by-step justification according to shared language and critera. A common failure mode of Extraverted Thinking is King on The Mountain, which I think everyone will instantly recognize.
Introverted Thinking and Extraverted Thinking, along with Extraverted Intuition and Introverted Intuition, are combined to create rationality. Extraverted Intuition provides the idea generation, Introverted Thinking provides pattern recognition, Extraverted Thinking handles justification, and Introverted Intuition avoids bias. According to the Jung-Thomson-Kovitz theory, all of these modes of thinking provide benefits and failure modes. For example, a failure mode of Introverted Thinking is that since it is aesthetic and subjective, it can be very hard for Introverted Thinkers with different inputs to reconcile worldviews if they differ, whereas Extraverted Thinkers could slowly hammer out agreement step-by-step.
LessWrong seems mostly dominated by INTJs, who have Introverted Intuition and Extraverted Thinking. They are mostly focused on justification and bias. These are important skills, but Introverted Thinking is important for marshaling the priors of the totality of your experience.
Continuing a bit…
It’s truly strange seeing you say something like “Very high level epistemic rationality is about retraining one’s brain to be able to see patterns in the evidence in the same way that we can see patterns when we observe the world with our eyes.” I already compulsively do the thing you talking about training yourself to do! I can’t stop seeing patterns. I don’t claim that the patterns I see are always true, just that’s it’s really easy for me to see them.
For me, thinking is like a gale wind carrying puzzle pieces that dance in the air and assemble themselves in front of me in gigantic structures, without any intervention by me. I do not experience this as an “ability” that I could “train”, because it doesn’t feel like there is any sort of “me” that is doing it: I am merely the passive observer. “Training” pattern recognition sounds as strange to me training vision itself: all I have to do is open my eyes, and it happens. Apparently it isn’t that way for everyone?
The only ways I’ve discovered to train my pattern recognition is to feed myself more information of higher quality (because garbage-in, garbage out), and to train my attention. Once I can learn to notice something, I will start to compulsively see patterns in it. For someone who isn’t compulsively maxing out their pattern recognition already, maybe it’s trainable.
Another example: my brain is often lining people in rows of 3 or 4 according to some collection of traits. There might “something” where Alice has more of it than Bob, and Bob has more of it than Carol. I see them standing next to each other, kind of like pieces on a chessboard. Basically, I think what my brain is doing is some kind of factor analysis where it is identifying unnamed dimensions behind people’s personalities and using them to make predictions. I’m pretty sure that not everyone is constantly doing this, but I could be wrong.
Perhaps someone smarter than me might be able to visualize a larger number of people in multiple dimensions in people-space. That would be pretty cool.
On a trivial level, everyone can do pattern-recognition to some degree, merely by virtue of being a human with general intelligence. Yet some people can synthesize larger amounts of information collected over a longer period of time, update their synthesis faster and more frequently, and can draw qualitatively different sorts of connections.
I think that’s what you are getting at when you talk about pattern recognition being important for epistemic rationality. Pattern recognition is like a mental muscle: some people have it stronger, some people have different types of muscles, and it’s probably trainable. There is only one sort of deduction, but perhaps there are many approaches to induction.
Luke’s description of Carl Shulman reminds me of Ben Kovitz’s description of Introverted Thinking as constantly writing and rewriting a book. When you ask Carl Shulman a question on AI, and he starts giving you facts instead of a straight answer, he is revealing part of his book.
“Many weak arguments” is not how this feels from the inside. From the inside, it all feels like one argument. Except the thing you are hearing from Carl Shulman is really only the tip of the iceberg because he cannot talk fast enough. His real answer to your question involves the totality of his knowledge of AI, or perhaps the totality of the contents of his brain.
For another example of taking arguments in totality vs. in isolation, see King On The Mountain, describing an immature form of Extraverted Thinking:
Some of the failure modes of Introverted Thinking involves seeing imaginary patterns, dealing with corrupted input, or having aesthetic biases (aesthetic bias is when you are biased towards an explanation that look neat or harmonious). Communication is also hard, but your true arguments would take a book to describe, if they could even be put into words at all.