OK, so the only point of your analogy was to explain how you feel about being asked to explain what DI is? Fair enough. Then all I can say is: It doesn’t seem to me that you’ve successfully communicated how you feel about that, since apparently you find it unreasonable to be asked to explain what DI is, whereas if I try to imagine myself in any genuinely-analogous situation then I don’t find it unreasonable to be asked the corresponding question.
I’m also rather confused about what your actual problem with explaining what DI is is. You say it’s kinda like the problem someone has who’s asked to explain what physics is. But (see above) it seems to me to be highly unlike that problem in a couple of respects that (for me) seem to be central to the difficulty of the problem. So what, in fact, is it about DI that makes it so difficult for you to say what it is?
An uncharitable explanation suggests itself: Perhaps you cannot say just what DI is because you don’t know what DI is; you’ve read things saying how wonderful it is, and you’ve experienced something that purports to be DI and found that it works well, and concluded: DI is great—without actually pinning down just what DI is. I don’t think this is terribly likely (though I suspect that situations of roughly that sort are quite common, and for sure I have been in them myself), but it might be useful for you to try explaining why you don’t think that’s what’s going on. (Assuming that you don’t.)
Yeah, this analogy-laden meta-digression is getting a bit ridiculous, I agree. Forget the physics stuff, at least for now.
Yeah, I am just a student of DI theory myself, largely just reciting outlines of my own mental notes.
If you could possibly find the time to check the online catalogs of any university libraries near you to see if they have the book… because if you could easily get your hands on a copy, it wouldn’t be too hard to just try skimming the section and chapter summaries.
An uncharitable explanation suggests itself: Perhaps you cannot say just what DI is because you don’t know what DI is; you’ve read things saying how wonderful it is, and you’ve experienced something that purports to be DI and found that it works well, and concluded: DI is great—without actually pinning down just what DI is. I don’t think this is terribly likely (though I suspect that situations of roughly that sort are quite common, and for sure I have been in them myself), but it might be useful for you to try explaining why you don’t think that’s what’s going on. (Assuming that you don’t.)
Quite honestly, yes, that is how it started.
But I was actually explicitly aware of it at the time, that my emotional experience with the Michel Thomas lessons was almost surely biasing me in my initial tentative vague estimate that there was a somewhere more than 50% chance that the results from Project Follow-Through were pretty much representative of something true about DI’s effectiveness in practice.
Although just because the experience with the Michel Thomas lessons was emotional doesn’t mean it should have been discarded as evidence, does it? Especially considering that I also had some evidence that many other people had had similar experiences (my vague impression that the ‘marketing anecdotes’ surrounding them as a product were slightly more numerous and slightly more gushing than usual, especially given how the lessons were in surface appearance much less polished compared to their competitors)… so maybe the bias wasn’t so bad, but I knew I had a general human bias to underestimate my biases, and might therefore overcompensate for it… which is a line of thought that just goes into insanity, so at the time the sanest thing I could do was accept my feelings of how good my experience with the audio lessons was as evidence as valid, right? As the best working level at the time?
Anyway, yeah, my estimate of the probability of there being something to DI theory, even though I found it just as mystifyingly vague as you did at first, was obviously bumped up a lot by my slightly stronger faith in the Project Follow-Through graphs as representing something true about DI’s practical effectiveness.
And as I found that bits of DI theory that had just seemed like techno-babble at first started to actually become meaningful to me, in recursive layers, I started to get really quite sure.
...And from that story you could probably give me some great feedback on my current level of general strength as a rationalist. How’s my epistemic driving? (Although I realize you’re in a position where you should probably expect that if you keep looking into DI theory your probability estimate of it being valid will more than likely move from ‘somewhere in the middle?’(?) to a position much closer to either 0 or 1, and that might complicate things… or not? I’d have to think about that.)
...This is me working on less than four hours of sleep a night for three days in a row, by the way. I’ma go to bed now.
OK, so the only point of your analogy was to explain how you feel about being asked to explain what DI is? Fair enough. Then all I can say is: It doesn’t seem to me that you’ve successfully communicated how you feel about that, since apparently you find it unreasonable to be asked to explain what DI is, whereas if I try to imagine myself in any genuinely-analogous situation then I don’t find it unreasonable to be asked the corresponding question.
I’m also rather confused about what your actual problem with explaining what DI is is. You say it’s kinda like the problem someone has who’s asked to explain what physics is. But (see above) it seems to me to be highly unlike that problem in a couple of respects that (for me) seem to be central to the difficulty of the problem. So what, in fact, is it about DI that makes it so difficult for you to say what it is?
An uncharitable explanation suggests itself: Perhaps you cannot say just what DI is because you don’t know what DI is; you’ve read things saying how wonderful it is, and you’ve experienced something that purports to be DI and found that it works well, and concluded: DI is great—without actually pinning down just what DI is. I don’t think this is terribly likely (though I suspect that situations of roughly that sort are quite common, and for sure I have been in them myself), but it might be useful for you to try explaining why you don’t think that’s what’s going on. (Assuming that you don’t.)
Yeah, this analogy-laden meta-digression is getting a bit ridiculous, I agree. Forget the physics stuff, at least for now.
Yeah, I am just a student of DI theory myself, largely just reciting outlines of my own mental notes.
If you could possibly find the time to check the online catalogs of any university libraries near you to see if they have the book… because if you could easily get your hands on a copy, it wouldn’t be too hard to just try skimming the section and chapter summaries.
Quite honestly, yes, that is how it started.
But I was actually explicitly aware of it at the time, that my emotional experience with the Michel Thomas lessons was almost surely biasing me in my initial tentative vague estimate that there was a somewhere more than 50% chance that the results from Project Follow-Through were pretty much representative of something true about DI’s effectiveness in practice.
Although just because the experience with the Michel Thomas lessons was emotional doesn’t mean it should have been discarded as evidence, does it? Especially considering that I also had some evidence that many other people had had similar experiences (my vague impression that the ‘marketing anecdotes’ surrounding them as a product were slightly more numerous and slightly more gushing than usual, especially given how the lessons were in surface appearance much less polished compared to their competitors)… so maybe the bias wasn’t so bad, but I knew I had a general human bias to underestimate my biases, and might therefore overcompensate for it… which is a line of thought that just goes into insanity, so at the time the sanest thing I could do was accept my feelings of how good my experience with the audio lessons was as evidence as valid, right? As the best working level at the time?
Anyway, yeah, my estimate of the probability of there being something to DI theory, even though I found it just as mystifyingly vague as you did at first, was obviously bumped up a lot by my slightly stronger faith in the Project Follow-Through graphs as representing something true about DI’s practical effectiveness.
And as I found that bits of DI theory that had just seemed like techno-babble at first started to actually become meaningful to me, in recursive layers, I started to get really quite sure.
At this point, I would be very surprised if any evidence I found that contradicted DI actually held up under scrutiny (and yes, give it a correspondingly greater weight if it did!)
...And from that story you could probably give me some great feedback on my current level of general strength as a rationalist. How’s my epistemic driving? (Although I realize you’re in a position where you should probably expect that if you keep looking into DI theory your probability estimate of it being valid will more than likely move from ‘somewhere in the middle?’(?) to a position much closer to either 0 or 1, and that might complicate things… or not? I’d have to think about that.)
...This is me working on less than four hours of sleep a night for three days in a row, by the way. I’ma go to bed now.