EDIT: a third update: man, I really want someone to actually try to “solve psychology” by combining insights from neo-hippies with systematizing thinking. Maybe this shouldn’t be CFAR’s job—I guess it used to be Leverage’s job, and that got kinda complicated—but I really want it to happen, and I don’t think academia will manage it any time soon.
FWIW, in a way that’s totally unrelated to what CFAR is up to, I’m looking to do something very close to this. I think subjective science is real and doable, and I’m pretty excited to make it happen. Step two might be to mimic the history of chemistry. But step one is more like a “literature review” of what actual science has actually been done, and which things (e.g. in psychology) are maybe kind of close or promising but need adjustment to hug the query properly. That includes things like looking at what Leverage has done.
There’s a ton to draw from in the neo-hippies’ stuff for sure, but nearly all of it is what I’d tag as “pre-scientific subjective engineering” (analogous to bloodletting in medicine: sometimes actually effective, but memetically optimized to appear effective and relevant within a pre-scientific context). I view them as a source of inspiration. Kind of like how alchemy had a ton of really interesting results that were what was to be investigated to create chemistry, but the frameworks of alchemy were almost perfectly useless for developing a science of chemical reactions.
FWIW, in a way that’s totally unrelated to what CFAR is up to, I’m looking to do something very close to this. I think subjective science is real and doable, and I’m pretty excited to make it happen. Step two might be to mimic the history of chemistry. But step one is more like a “literature review” of what actual science has actually been done, and which things (e.g. in psychology) are maybe kind of close or promising but need adjustment to hug the query properly. That includes things like looking at what Leverage has done.
There’s a ton to draw from in the neo-hippies’ stuff for sure, but nearly all of it is what I’d tag as “pre-scientific subjective engineering” (analogous to bloodletting in medicine: sometimes actually effective, but memetically optimized to appear effective and relevant within a pre-scientific context). I view them as a source of inspiration. Kind of like how alchemy had a ton of really interesting results that were what was to be investigated to create chemistry, but the frameworks of alchemy were almost perfectly useless for developing a science of chemical reactions.