This post opens with the claim that most human thinking amounts to babble-and-prune. My reaction was (1) that’s basically right, (2) babble-and-prune is a pretty lame algorithm, (3) it is possible for humans to do better, even though we usually don’t. More than anything else, “Babble” convinced me to pay attention to my own reasoning algorithms and strive to do better. I wrote a couple posts which are basically “how to think better than babble”—Mazes and Crayon and Slackness and Constraints Exercises—and will probably write more on the topic in the future.
“Babble” is the baseline for all that. It’s a key background concept; the reason the techniques in “Mazes and Crayon” or “Slackness and Constraints” are important is because without them, we have to fall back on babble-and-prune. That’s the mark to beat.
”1. A blind-variation-and-selective-retention process is fundamental to all inductive achievements, to all genuine increases in knowledge, to all increases in fit of system to environment.
2. The many processes which shortcut a more full blind-variation-and-selective-retention process are in themselves inductive achievements, containing wisdom about the environment achieved originally by blind variation and selective retention.
3. In addition, such shortcut processes contain in their own operation a blind variation-and-selective-retention process at some level, substituting for overt locomotor exploration or the life-and-death winnowing of organic evolution”
This post opens with the claim that most human thinking amounts to babble-and-prune. My reaction was (1) that’s basically right, (2) babble-and-prune is a pretty lame algorithm, (3) it is possible for humans to do better, even though we usually don’t. More than anything else, “Babble” convinced me to pay attention to my own reasoning algorithms and strive to do better. I wrote a couple posts which are basically “how to think better than babble”—Mazes and Crayon and Slackness and Constraints Exercises—and will probably write more on the topic in the future.
“Babble” is the baseline for all that. It’s a key background concept; the reason the techniques in “Mazes and Crayon” or “Slackness and Constraints” are important is because without them, we have to fall back on babble-and-prune. That’s the mark to beat.
As noted in a different comment, Donald Campbell proposed that this was what humans often do in 1960; https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040373.
”1. A blind-variation-and-selective-retention process is fundamental to all inductive achievements, to all genuine increases in knowledge, to all increases in fit of system to environment.
2. The many processes which shortcut a more full blind-variation-and-selective-retention process are in themselves inductive achievements, containing wisdom about the environment achieved originally by blind variation and selective retention.
3. In addition, such shortcut processes contain in their own operation a blind variation-and-selective-retention process at some level, substituting for overt locomotor exploration or the life-and-death winnowing of organic evolution”