Large communities don’t constitute help or progress on the “beyond the realm of feedback” problem. In the absence of feedback, how is a community supposed to know when one of its members has made progress? Even with feedback we have cases like psychotherapy and dietary science where experimental results are simply ignored. Look at the case of physics and many-worlds. What has “diversity” done for the Singularity so far? Kurzweil has gotten more people talking about “the Singularity”—and lo, the average wit of the majority hath fallen. If anything, trying to throw a large community at the problem just guarantees that you get the average result of failure, rather than being able to notice one of the rare individuals or minority communities that can make progress using lower amounts of evidence.
I may even go so far as to call “applause light” or “unrelated charge of positive affect” on the invocation of a “diverse community” here, because of the degree to which the solution fails to address the problem.
In the absence of feedback, how is a community supposed to know when one of its members has made progress?
Good question. It seems that academic philosophy does, to an extent, achieve this. The mechanism seems to be that it is easier to check an argument for correctness than to generate it. And it is easier to check whether a claimed flaw in an argument really is a flaw, and so on.
In this case, a mechanism where everyone in the community tries to think of arguments, and tries to think of flaws in others’ arguments, and tries to think of flaws in the criticisms of arguments, etc, means that as the community size --> infinity, the field converges on the truth.
Good question. It seems that academic philosophy does, to an extent, achieve this.
With some of my engagements with academic philosophers in mind I have at times been tempted to lament that that ‘extent’ wasn’t rather a lot greater. Of course, that may be ‘the glass is half empty’ thinking. I intuit that there is potential for a larger body of contributers to have even more of a correcting influence of the kind that you mention than what we see in practice!
Philosophy has made some pretty significant progress in many areas. However, sometimes disciplines of that form can get “stuck” in an inescapable pit of nonsense, e.g. postmodernism or theology. In a sense, the philosophy community is trying to re-do what the theologians have failed at: answering questions such as “how should I live”, etc.
Many-worlds has made steady progress since it was invented. Especially early on, trying to bring in diversity would get you some many-worlds proponents rather than none, and their views would tend to spread.
Think of how much more progress could have been made if the early many-worlds proponents had gotten together and formed a private colloquium of the sane, providing only that they had access to the same amount of per capita grant funding (this latter point being not about a need for diversity but a need to pander to gatekeepers).
Large communities don’t constitute help or progress on the “beyond the realm of feedback” problem. In the absence of feedback, how is a community supposed to know when one of its members has made progress? Even with feedback we have cases like psychotherapy and dietary science where experimental results are simply ignored. Look at the case of physics and many-worlds. What has “diversity” done for the Singularity so far? Kurzweil has gotten more people talking about “the Singularity”—and lo, the average wit of the majority hath fallen. If anything, trying to throw a large community at the problem just guarantees that you get the average result of failure, rather than being able to notice one of the rare individuals or minority communities that can make progress using lower amounts of evidence.
I may even go so far as to call “applause light” or “unrelated charge of positive affect” on the invocation of a “diverse community” here, because of the degree to which the solution fails to address the problem.
Good question. It seems that academic philosophy does, to an extent, achieve this. The mechanism seems to be that it is easier to check an argument for correctness than to generate it. And it is easier to check whether a claimed flaw in an argument really is a flaw, and so on.
In this case, a mechanism where everyone in the community tries to think of arguments, and tries to think of flaws in others’ arguments, and tries to think of flaws in the criticisms of arguments, etc, means that as the community size --> infinity, the field converges on the truth.
With some of my engagements with academic philosophers in mind I have at times been tempted to lament that that ‘extent’ wasn’t rather a lot greater. Of course, that may be ‘the glass is half empty’ thinking. I intuit that there is potential for a larger body of contributers to have even more of a correcting influence of the kind that you mention than what we see in practice!
Philosophy has made some pretty significant progress in many areas. However, sometimes disciplines of that form can get “stuck” in an inescapable pit of nonsense, e.g. postmodernism or theology. In a sense, the philosophy community is trying to re-do what the theologians have failed at: answering questions such as “how should I live”, etc.
Many-worlds has made steady progress since it was invented. Especially early on, trying to bring in diversity would get you some many-worlds proponents rather than none, and their views would tend to spread.
Think of how much more progress could have been made if the early many-worlds proponents had gotten together and formed a private colloquium of the sane, providing only that they had access to the same amount of per capita grant funding (this latter point being not about a need for diversity but a need to pander to gatekeepers).
It isn’t clear to me that the MWI-only group would have achieved anything extra—do you think that they would have done?