I feel like alkjash’s characterization of “correctness” is just not at all what the material I read was pointing towards.
The Sequences’ emphasis on Bayes rule
Maybe I’m misremembering. But for me, the core Thing this part of the Sequences imparted was “intelligence, beliefs, information, etc—it’s not arbitrary. It’s lawful. It has structure. Here, take a look. Get a feel for what it means for those sorts of things to ‘have structure, be lawful’. Bake it into your patterns of thought, that feeling.”
If a bunch of people are instead taking away as the core Thing “you can do explicit calculations to update your beliefs” I would feel pretty sad about that, I think?
You need your mind to have at least barely enough correctness-structure/Lawfulness to make your ideas semi-correct, or at least easy to correct them later.
Then you want to increase originality within that space.
And if you need more original ideas, you go outside that space (e.g. by assuming your premises are false, or by taking drugs; yes, these are the same class of thing), and then clawing those ideas back into the Lawfulness zone.
Reading things like this, and seeing how long it took them to remember “Babble vs Prune”, makes me wonder if people just forgot the existence of the “create, then edit” pattern. So people end up rounding off to “Youdon’t need to edit or learn more, because all of my creative ideas are also semi-correct in the first place”. Or “You can’t create good-in-hindsight ideas without editing tools X Y Z in your toolbelt”.
I feel like alkjash’s characterization of “correctness” is just not at all what the material I read was pointing towards.
Maybe I’m misremembering. But for me, the core Thing this part of the Sequences imparted was “intelligence, beliefs, information, etc—it’s not arbitrary. It’s lawful. It has structure. Here, take a look. Get a feel for what it means for those sorts of things to ‘have structure, be lawful’. Bake it into your patterns of thought, that feeling.”
If a bunch of people are instead taking away as the core Thing “you can do explicit calculations to update your beliefs” I would feel pretty sad about that, I think?
Agreed. I think of it as:
You need your mind to have at least barely enough correctness-structure/Lawfulness to make your ideas semi-correct, or at least easy to correct them later.
Then you want to increase originality within that space.
And if you need more original ideas, you go outside that space (e.g. by assuming your premises are false, or by taking drugs; yes, these are the same class of thing), and then clawing those ideas back into the Lawfulness zone.
Reading things like this, and seeing how long it took them to remember “Babble vs Prune”, makes me wonder if people just forgot the existence of the “create, then edit” pattern. So people end up rounding off to “You don’t need to edit or learn more, because all of my creative ideas are also semi-correct in the first place”. Or “You can’t create good-in-hindsight ideas without editing tools X Y Z in your toolbelt”.
The answer is probably closer to one of these than the other, and yadda yadda social engineering something something community beliefs, but man do people talk like they believe these trivially-false extreme cases.