I’m confused, you seem to describe a very elaborate model of cognition, yet I can find no literature review, no testable predictions and no experimental results to ground this model in something observable. What is this model based on?
The second part seems to build on Babble and Prune, which was a previous sequence here, but also makes a very large number of predictions in a relatively straightforward fashion. Many of those predictions are also covered in the Babble and Prune sequence, though the basic idea of “part of human cognition works by generating hypotheses though some stochastic process, and then filtering out the bad ones” is very widespread in cognitive psychology.
In general, probabilistic inference is comprised of two steps: hypothesis generation and hypothesis evaluation, with feedback between these two processes.
This assumption is widely shared in really broad swaths of cognitive science.
I confess, your comment surprised me by calling for a different epistemic standard than I figured this article required. I had to unpack and address several issues, listed below.
I can make a bibliography from the links I’ve already included, if it would help.
Are there any specific assertions in this article that you think call for more evidence to support them over the alternatives?
This article is meant to build the foundation for explaining the concepts that we’ll be working with in the next article. After that article, we’ll mostly be using those concepts instead. Those will be supported by your own observations of how people learn different skills with varying degrees of difficulty.
I didn’t know how much of the theory I was building on would be taken as a given in this community, so I decided to just post and see what wasn’t already part of the general LW paradigm. I’d like to hear from more people before I make any judgment calls.
These ideas at this point in the sequence are not intended to make new predictions that would require the introduction of new evidence. They are intended to help the reader more clearly and efficiently conceptualize the information they already have. This article asserts that some ideas are conceptually distinct from each other and others aren’t, which is not an empirical issue. The technical terms I introduce in the article are a condensation and consolidation of existing ideas, so that people can more easily process and apply new information. I predict that as I continue to explain the paradigms I’ve developed, they will be consistent with each other and with empirical evidence, and that the reader will develop a more elegant perspective which will allow them to apply their knowledge more effectively. It may be that I need to make that more clear in future articles.
Does that all make sense? I’ll work on framing future articles so that it’s clear when they are making empirical predictions from evidence and when they are presenting a concept as being better than other concepts at carving reality at its joints.
This post came across to me as mostly speculative but trying to be academic, I may well be wrong. Habryka in the other comment suggested that your claims have some grounding that I was not aware of. Additionally, I do not subscribe to the local lore of Eliezer’s contrarianism and extreme Bayesianism. The metaphor of “reality joints”, or “reality fluid”, falls flat for me, as well. If you perspective is different, then feel free to disregard my comment, it’s not like you and I can square our epistemic views in a comment thread.
I’m confused, you seem to describe a very elaborate model of cognition, yet I can find no literature review, no testable predictions and no experimental results to ground this model in something observable. What is this model based on?
The first part seems to mostly be building off of Eliezer’s technical explanation of a technical explanation. And it does successfully link to it.
The second part seems to build on Babble and Prune, which was a previous sequence here, but also makes a very large number of predictions in a relatively straightforward fashion. Many of those predictions are also covered in the Babble and Prune sequence, though the basic idea of “part of human cognition works by generating hypotheses though some stochastic process, and then filtering out the bad ones” is very widespread in cognitive psychology.
As a random example, take this paper: http://gershmanlab.webfactional.com/pubs/Dasgupta17.pdf
It says:
This assumption is widely shared in really broad swaths of cognitive science.
I confess, your comment surprised me by calling for a different epistemic standard than I figured this article required. I had to unpack and address several issues, listed below.
I can make a bibliography from the links I’ve already included, if it would help.
Are there any specific assertions in this article that you think call for more evidence to support them over the alternatives?
This article is meant to build the foundation for explaining the concepts that we’ll be working with in the next article. After that article, we’ll mostly be using those concepts instead. Those will be supported by your own observations of how people learn different skills with varying degrees of difficulty.
I didn’t know how much of the theory I was building on would be taken as a given in this community, so I decided to just post and see what wasn’t already part of the general LW paradigm. I’d like to hear from more people before I make any judgment calls.
These ideas at this point in the sequence are not intended to make new predictions that would require the introduction of new evidence. They are intended to help the reader more clearly and efficiently conceptualize the information they already have. This article asserts that some ideas are conceptually distinct from each other and others aren’t, which is not an empirical issue. The technical terms I introduce in the article are a condensation and consolidation of existing ideas, so that people can more easily process and apply new information. I predict that as I continue to explain the paradigms I’ve developed, they will be consistent with each other and with empirical evidence, and that the reader will develop a more elegant perspective which will allow them to apply their knowledge more effectively. It may be that I need to make that more clear in future articles.
In order to think effectively, there are many concepts we can and must learn and apply without relying on the scientific establishment to do experiments for us.
Does that all make sense? I’ll work on framing future articles so that it’s clear when they are making empirical predictions from evidence and when they are presenting a concept as being better than other concepts at carving reality at its joints.
This post came across to me as mostly speculative but trying to be academic, I may well be wrong. Habryka in the other comment suggested that your claims have some grounding that I was not aware of. Additionally, I do not subscribe to the local lore of Eliezer’s contrarianism and extreme Bayesianism. The metaphor of “reality joints”, or “reality fluid”, falls flat for me, as well. If you perspective is different, then feel free to disregard my comment, it’s not like you and I can square our epistemic views in a comment thread.