There are infinitely many hypotheses that we could come up with. We’d die of old age while brainstorming about just one issue that way. We must consider which hypotheses to consider. I think you have background knowledge filtering out most hypotheses.
Right, sure. I should have said something more like: we are well-advised to avoid the pitfall of latching onto one hypothesis or a small number of overly similar hypotheses.
Here’s a concrete piece of advice which I endorse: whenever you notice that your analysis of something feels finished, as a matter of principle, consider thinking up a very different hypothesis. You don’t necessarily have to do it, since you’d get stuck in an infinite loop of analysis if you enforced it as a rule. But it’s important to do it often.
Rather than consider as many ideas as we can, we have to focus our limited attention. I propose that this is a major epistemological problem meriting attention and discussion, and that thinking about bottlenecks and excess capacity can help with focusing.
I think that, due to working memory constraints, our innate evolved heuristics tend toward seeing the world in just one way. So, for scientific thinking, it’s particularly important to pull in the other direction.
People (I believe) don’t naturally fall into a trap of being lost in a sea of too many hypotheses, because people have to generate each hypothesis and explicitly consider it—which takes time. It’s not like you come upon a haystack and are looking for a needle. It’s more like trying to guess Nature’s password. You have to explicitly construct more guesses.
So if you are explicitly setting out to spend more time thinking (in order to reach better conclusions), then coming up with more guesses is going to tend to be a good use of time.
As such, I still mostly stand by this statement you quoted:
It’s like… optimizing is always about evaluating more and more alternatives so that you can find better and better things.
(With the exception of cases resembling calculus, where you can optimize without trying any options, because you can solve for the optimum based on your prior information—IE, cases where logic is enough to narrow down the right answer.)
Granted, you absolutely can fall into a trap of not focusing on any one hypothesis for long enough.
Right, sure. I should have said something more like: we are well-advised to avoid the pitfall of latching onto one hypothesis or a small number of overly similar hypotheses.
Here’s a concrete piece of advice which I endorse: whenever you notice that your analysis of something feels finished, as a matter of principle, consider thinking up a very different hypothesis. You don’t necessarily have to do it, since you’d get stuck in an infinite loop of analysis if you enforced it as a rule. But it’s important to do it often.
I think that, due to working memory constraints, our innate evolved heuristics tend toward seeing the world in just one way. So, for scientific thinking, it’s particularly important to pull in the other direction.
People (I believe) don’t naturally fall into a trap of being lost in a sea of too many hypotheses, because people have to generate each hypothesis and explicitly consider it—which takes time. It’s not like you come upon a haystack and are looking for a needle. It’s more like trying to guess Nature’s password. You have to explicitly construct more guesses.
So if you are explicitly setting out to spend more time thinking (in order to reach better conclusions), then coming up with more guesses is going to tend to be a good use of time.
As such, I still mostly stand by this statement you quoted:
(With the exception of cases resembling calculus, where you can optimize without trying any options, because you can solve for the optimum based on your prior information—IE, cases where logic is enough to narrow down the right answer.)
Granted, you absolutely can fall into a trap of not focusing on any one hypothesis for long enough.