You mean all that stuff that famously fails to replicate on a regular basis and huge swaths of which have turned out to be basically nonsense…?
the general study of minds-in-general
I don’t think I know what this is. Are you talking about animal psychology, or formal logic (and similarly mathematical fields like probability theory), or what…?
There is some fact-of-the-matter about what sort of human cultures find out the most interesting and important things most quickly.
No doubt there is, but I would like to see something more than just a casual assumption that we have any useful amount of “scientific” or otherwise rigorous knowledge (as opposed to, e.g., “narrative” knowledge, or knowledge that consists of heuristics derived from experience) about this.
I don’t think I know what this is. Are you talking about animal psychology, or formal logic (and similarly mathematical fields like probability theory), or what…?
Some examples I have in mind here are game theory, information theory, and algorithm design. I think the thing on my mind when I wrote the sentence was How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, which touches on different ways you might structure a network that would have different implications on the algorithm’s efficiency and what errors it might make as a side effect.
To be clear, I don’t currently think I have beliefs about moderation that are strongly downstream of those fields. It’s more that I think it’s useful, on a forum that is in-large-part about the intersection of these (and similar) fields, it’s nice to step between my practical best guesses of how what practical tools to apply, and what underlying laws might govern things, even if the laws I know of don’t directly apply to the situation.
Game theory is the bit that I feel like I’ve looked into the most myself and grokked, with Most Prisoner’s Dilemmas are Stag Hunts; Most Stag Hunts are Schelling Problems being an example I found particularly crisp and illuminating, and Elinor Ostrom’s Governance of the Commons being useful for digging into the details of messy human examples, and giving me a sense of what it’d mean to actually translate them into a formalization.
You mean all that stuff that famously fails to replicate on a regular basis and huge swaths of which have turned out to be basically nonsense…?
I don’t think I know what this is. Are you talking about animal psychology, or formal logic (and similarly mathematical fields like probability theory), or what…?
No doubt there is, but I would like to see something more than just a casual assumption that we have any useful amount of “scientific” or otherwise rigorous knowledge (as opposed to, e.g., “narrative” knowledge, or knowledge that consists of heuristics derived from experience) about this.
Some examples I have in mind here are game theory, information theory, and algorithm design. I think the thing on my mind when I wrote the sentence was How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, which touches on different ways you might structure a network that would have different implications on the algorithm’s efficiency and what errors it might make as a side effect.
To be clear, I don’t currently think I have beliefs about moderation that are strongly downstream of those fields. It’s more that I think it’s useful, on a forum that is in-large-part about the intersection of these (and similar) fields, it’s nice to step between my practical best guesses of how what practical tools to apply, and what underlying laws might govern things, even if the laws I know of don’t directly apply to the situation.
Game theory is the bit that I feel like I’ve looked into the most myself and grokked, with Most Prisoner’s Dilemmas are Stag Hunts; Most Stag Hunts are Schelling Problems being an example I found particularly crisp and illuminating, and Elinor Ostrom’s Governance of the Commons being useful for digging into the details of messy human examples, and giving me a sense of what it’d mean to actually translate them into a formalization.
FYI I include a lot of Zack’s philosophy-of-language-translated-into-abstracted-python useful here, and I’d also include your Selective, Corrective, Structural: Three Ways of Making Social Systems Work an example of something I’d expect to still hold up in some alien civilizations.