My interpretation of your Gears-ness tracks well with the degree to which prior beliefs are interrelated.
Interrelatedness of prior beliefs is useful because it allows for rapid updating on limited information. If I visit another world and find that matches don’t work, for example, I will begin investigating all sorts of other chemical interactions and question how the hell I’m deriving energy, as clearly oxygen doesn’t work the way I think it does any more. I’ll re-evaluate every related prior.
An unrelated prior belief acts like a single gear—an update on it may change the direction of itself, but doesn’t give me other useful information. A highly interrelated prior belief gives me many avenues of investigation in finding what other prior beliefs were wrong, and helps me make more predictions accurately in other contexts.
A sufficiently interrelated prior has many checks on itself; and if you blank a particular belief, if it is still connected to other beliefs you should be able to derive a likely result from the beliefs connected to it.
An aside—I’d really like to give you karma for this post, but I can’t figure out how to do so. Is there some limitation on giving karma?
My interpretation of your Gears-ness tracks well with the degree to which prior beliefs are interrelated.
Yep, that seems right to me. I’m a bit bugged by (my and maybe your) lack of Gears around what’s meant by “interrelated”, but yeah, this matches my impressions. I like the explicit connection to priors.
His brain ought to have been flushing its entire current stock of hypotheses about the universe, none of which allowed this to happen. But instead his brain just seemed to be going, All right, I saw the Hogwarts Professor wave her wand and make your father rise into the air, now what?
The witch-lady was smiling benevolently upon them, looking quite amused. “Would you like a further demonstration, Mr. Potter?”
“You don’t have to,” Harry said. “We’ve performed a definitive experiment. But...” Harry hesitated. He couldn’t help himself. Actually, under the circumstances, he shouldn’t be helping himself. It was right and proper to be curious. “What else can you do?”
Professor McGonagall turned into a cat.
Harry scrambled back unthinkingly, backpedalling so fast that he tripped over a stray stack of books and landed hard on his bottom with a thwack. His hands came down to catch himself without quite reaching properly, and there was a warning twinge in his shoulder as the weight came down unbraced.
My interpretation of your Gears-ness tracks well with the degree to which prior beliefs are interrelated.
Interrelatedness of prior beliefs is useful because it allows for rapid updating on limited information. If I visit another world and find that matches don’t work, for example, I will begin investigating all sorts of other chemical interactions and question how the hell I’m deriving energy, as clearly oxygen doesn’t work the way I think it does any more. I’ll re-evaluate every related prior.
An unrelated prior belief acts like a single gear—an update on it may change the direction of itself, but doesn’t give me other useful information. A highly interrelated prior belief gives me many avenues of investigation in finding what other prior beliefs were wrong, and helps me make more predictions accurately in other contexts.
A sufficiently interrelated prior has many checks on itself; and if you blank a particular belief, if it is still connected to other beliefs you should be able to derive a likely result from the beliefs connected to it.
An aside—I’d really like to give you karma for this post, but I can’t figure out how to do so. Is there some limitation on giving karma?
Yep, that seems right to me. I’m a bit bugged by (my and maybe your) lack of Gears around what’s meant by “interrelated”, but yeah, this matches my impressions. I like the explicit connection to priors.
I’m reminded of this from HPMOR chapter 2:
I think there’s a minimum amount of karma you need for it.