I enjoyed your post.
I am relatively new to less wrong, but also have been influenced by Buddhism, and am glad to see it come up here.
The confusion you point at between faith and belief is appreciated and was an important distinction I did not make for roughly the first 20 years or so of my life. The foundational axiom I use so as to not fall into the infinite skepticism you mention is the idea that it’s okay to try and build, help, learn, and contribute even if you don’t understand things completely. I also hold out hope for the universe and life to ultimately make sense, and I try to understand it, but I suspect it will all amount to an absurd Sisyphean act.
What is referred to as faith or trust in the post I refer to as open mindedness. I think it maps without issue to the same concept you are referring to, but I am open to distinctions being drawn.
The other thing I wanted to mention, if anyone found the distinction between belief and faith especially interesting, and would be interested to understand how even within religious communities belief can be detrimental, I recommend the book The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse. It explores this subject in depth and is quite enjoyable.
The title is ‘A Hierarchy of Abstraction’ but the article focuses on levels of intelligence. The article claims that intelligence positively correlates with the ability to handle high level abstractions, but it does not talk about actual hierarchies of abstraction. For example, I’d expect a hierarchy of abstraction to contain things like: concrete objects, imagined concrete objects, classes of concrete objects, concrete processes, simulated processes, etc. A more accurate title might be ‘The Ability to Understand and Use Abstractions in Computer Science as a Measure of Intelligence.’
The article lays out a way of measuring fluid intelligence but does not decouple the crystallized intelligence requirements from the fluid ones. For example, ‘Understands Recursion’ specifies needing to implement a specific algorithm recursively as a requirement. There are plenty of people who understand and use recursion regularly who do not know that algorithm. (take me) Let’s say you test them and they fail. Did they fail because of their fluid intelligence? Did they fail because of a lack of crystallized knowledge related to that specific problem? Did they fail because of abstraction capability requirements in that specific problem, but not recursion in general?
What about recursion as a concept makes it hard for people to understand? I would recommend trying to generalize the requirements more. I would recommend exploring other possible attributions of failure other then fluid intelligence. If the article examined the components of recursion it would be more interesting and compelling. What are the components?
Drilling down into the components of any of these tests will reveal a lot of context and crystallized knowledge that the article may be taking for granted. (curse of knowledge bias) You might be seeing someone struggle with recursion, and the problem isn’t that they can’t understand recursion, its that they don’t have crystallized knowledge of a building block. As someone who understands recursion to a reasonable level, I’d like to see the article point at the key idea behind recursion that people have trouble grasping. Are there a sequence of words that the article can specify where someone understands what each word means, but finds the overall sentence ineffable? Or perhaps they can parrot it back, but they can’t apply it to a novel problem. A requirement of this hypothesis is that someone has all prerequisite crystallized knowledge, but still cannot solve the problem. Otherwise these are not ‘hard’ boundaries of fluid intelligence.
I guess you primarily deal with computers and programming. One way to try and generalize this quickly would be to compare notes across disciplines and identify the pattern. Is there a ‘cannot learn pointers’ in chemistry for example?
I understand that you are trying to share the gist of an idea, but I think these are things that should be further examined if you want other people to take on this mental model.
Much more needs to be said and examined in an article that lays out 10 specific levels with specific tests.
I’d also be wary of the possibility this entire framework / system looks good because it positions your tribe as superior (computer programmers) and possibly you somewhere comfortably towards the top.
This article triggered me emotionally because I think one of the things that prevents people from learning things is the belief that they can’t. I wouldn’t want anyone to take away from this article that because they didn’t understand pointers or recursion at some point in there life, it was because they are dumb and should stop trying.