People keep discovering ideas I came up with years ago which weren’t understood. I said “Book-smarts and street-smarts” instead of “Truthseeking and embeddedness”, but yeah, there’s a difference between the inside and outside perspective (or in my view, between global and local optimum).
But I don’t think always taking an outside perspective on things is healthy. For instance, meaning in life only exists from the inside, so if you look too much from the outside, the value of things on the inside will diminish and seem “false”. No wonder philosophers are so gloomy, the problem they’re trying to solve is caused by their attempt to solve it.
That truth seeking is different from winning is the core idea of the Erhard Seminars Training from the 1970s. It was a pretty interesting program.
I’ll warn against trying to solve problems though. Something being a “problem” is often not a fact, but a perspective, and all problems have their merit. Even if you consider a thing in isolation, you might forget that it’s connected to a whole web of other things, and that any changes will have effects elsewhere. Modeling the entire thing is likely beyond human ability, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
your models are themselves a key feature of the problem’s structure
Indeed. Does this not lead to a reflexive property? How agents act in reality depends on the mental model of the agents, but the agents are modeling the reality they’re currently inside, its agents included. But I think there’s no singular objective truth in a system with such a property.
People keep discovering ideas I came up with years ago which weren’t understood. I said “Book-smarts and street-smarts” instead of “Truthseeking and embeddedness”, but yeah, there’s a difference between the inside and outside perspective (or in my view, between global and local optimum).
But I don’t think always taking an outside perspective on things is healthy. For instance, meaning in life only exists from the inside, so if you look too much from the outside, the value of things on the inside will diminish and seem “false”. No wonder philosophers are so gloomy, the problem they’re trying to solve is caused by their attempt to solve it.
That truth seeking is different from winning is the core idea of the Erhard Seminars Training from the 1970s. It was a pretty interesting program.
I’ll warn against trying to solve problems though. Something being a “problem” is often not a fact, but a perspective, and all problems have their merit. Even if you consider a thing in isolation, you might forget that it’s connected to a whole web of other things, and that any changes will have effects elsewhere. Modeling the entire thing is likely beyond human ability, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Indeed. Does this not lead to a reflexive property? How agents act in reality depends on the mental model of the agents, but the agents are modeling the reality they’re currently inside, its agents included. But I think there’s no singular objective truth in a system with such a property.