Yes, this also seems related to a lot of the stuff I’ve been talking about with Fermi Modeling, and also a bunch of stuff that Peter Thiel calls Pyrrhonian Scepticism.
Pyrrhonian Scepticism as described there sounds like the thing I’m arguing against as not-quite-right: looking for the negation. The idea implies that you’re attached to a hypothesis. It sets a low bar, where you come up with one other hypothesis. I won’t deny that this is a useful mental tool, but false dichotomies are almost as bad as attachment to single beliefs, and for the same reason, and it sets up a misleading standard of evidence. The idea that you generate experiments by trying to falsify a hypothesis is confusing. It’s better than trying to confirm, but only because it starts to point toward the real thing. You generate experiments, and evidence, by trying to differentiate.
EDIT: Ok, that seems too strong. “trying to disprove”/”looking for the negation” is a convenient whipping-boy for my argument, because it’s a pervasive idea which value-of-information beats. Nonetheless, asking “what if I’m wrong about that?” is more like the starting point for generating multiple hypotheses, than it is an alternative. So, the method is inexact because it is incomplete. It’s likely, for example, that the way Peter Thiel employs the method amounts to the whole picture I’m gesturing at. But, there’s a different way you can employ the method, where the negation of your hypothesis is interpreted to imply absurd things. In this version, you can think you’re making the right motions (not falling prey to confirmation bias), and be wrong.
The steel-man of Pyrrhonian Skepticism is something like “look for cruxes” in the double-crux sense. Look for variables which have high value of information for you. Look for things which differentiate between the most plausible hypotheses.
Yes, this also seems related to a lot of the stuff I’ve been talking about with Fermi Modeling, and also a bunch of stuff that Peter Thiel calls Pyrrhonian Scepticism.
Pyrrhonian Scepticism as described there sounds like the thing I’m arguing against as not-quite-right: looking for the negation. The idea implies that you’re attached to a hypothesis. It sets a low bar, where you come up with one other hypothesis. I won’t deny that this is a useful mental tool, but false dichotomies are almost as bad as attachment to single beliefs, and for the same reason, and it sets up a misleading standard of evidence. The idea that you generate experiments by trying to falsify a hypothesis is confusing. It’s better than trying to confirm, but only because it starts to point toward the real thing. You generate experiments, and evidence, by trying to differentiate.
EDIT: Ok, that seems too strong. “trying to disprove”/”looking for the negation” is a convenient whipping-boy for my argument, because it’s a pervasive idea which value-of-information beats. Nonetheless, asking “what if I’m wrong about that?” is more like the starting point for generating multiple hypotheses, than it is an alternative. So, the method is inexact because it is incomplete. It’s likely, for example, that the way Peter Thiel employs the method amounts to the whole picture I’m gesturing at. But, there’s a different way you can employ the method, where the negation of your hypothesis is interpreted to imply absurd things. In this version, you can think you’re making the right motions (not falling prey to confirmation bias), and be wrong.
The steel-man of Pyrrhonian Skepticism is something like “look for cruxes” in the double-crux sense. Look for variables which have high value of information for you. Look for things which differentiate between the most plausible hypotheses.