Especially for the study of consciousness and mental states, I associate this useful tactic with Daniel Dennett’s term “heterophenomenology”.
thomascolthurst
Thoughts on “Ontological Crises”
Goodhart’s Law and Genies
Hi. I’m Thomas Colthurst. I will be doing a visiting fellowship at the Singularity Institute this summer.
I answer the “why are trees so tall” question at http://whirledofideas.blogspot.com/2015/05/why-are-trees-tall.html . The rough answer is that height limiting treaties need to be enforced, and enforcement is costly, and for the most obvious enforcement mechanism that trees have available (negative allelopathy), enforcement is not observable by other trees. So if any trees did enforce a height limiting treaty, the trees that freeloaded on their enforcement would out-compete them, and that’s why we see tall trees and not height-treaty-limited trees.
FYI, there are published counterexamples to Cox’s theorem. See for example Joseph Halpern’s at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.5450.pdf.
Perfect descriptions of reality are unattainable, unnecessary, and too costly for learning organisms, including humans. But workable descriptions are indispensable. So knowledge systems, like maps, are a complex blend of realism, flexibility, usefulness, and inspiration.
-- David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
Prior work, in the form of a twitter joke: https://twitter.com/thomascolthurst/status/1032345388605431810
There is a large existing literature on pruning neural networks, starting with the 1990 paper “Optimal Brain Damage” by Le Cun, Denker and Solla. A recent paper with more references is https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03635.pdf
Reported by Chet Raymo