= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Yvain comments on It's all in your head-land - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (67)
First off, welcome to Less Wrong! Check out the welcome thread if you haven't already.
You have a good writing style, but I hope you'll pardon me if I make a few suggestions based on the usual audience for Less Wrong posts:
Typically, a post of this length should be broken up into a sequence; you run the risk of "too long; didn't read" reactions after 1000 words, let alone 3000, and the conversation in the comments is usually sharper if the post has a single narrow focus. Usually, the analysis of a situation and the recommendations become separate posts if both are substantial.
Secondly, with the notable exception (sometimes) of P.J. Eby, we're often mistrustful of theories borne of introspection and anecdotes, and especially of recommendations based on such theories. There's therefore a norm of looking for and linking to experimental confirmation where it exists, and being doubly cautious if it doesn't. In this case, for instance, you could find some experimental evidence on choking that supports your thesis. This also forces you to think carefully about what sort of things your model predicts and doesn't predict, since at first glance it seems vague to the point of danger. The more specific you can get about these phenomena, the more useful your post will be.
Although I agree that a theory born of empirical evidence is better than one born of introspection, I think it is kind of dangerous to introspect, develop a theory, and then when you're posting it on Less Wrong look for some evidence to support it so that you can say it's empirical. It risks reducing The Procurement of Evidence to a ritual.
See, the problem is, he could probably tie the evidence about choking into his theory. But if he had the opposite theory, he could probably tie studies like the ones showing mental practice can improve sports performance and the one showing that problem-solving areas of the brain are highly active when we daydream in to support that. That means that the fact that he can find a tangentially related study doesn't really make it more likely that the post is true. It'd just make us feel all nice and empirical
The matter would be different if there happened to be a study about this exact topic, or if there had been some study that had inspired him to come up with this theory. But "come up with theory, find supporting evidence" seems dangerous to me.
Isn't the answer simply that one shouldn't misinterpret what it means for evidence to be supporting?
Oh, good point. I think of "come up with theory, think about what it implies, look for evidence one way or the other" as the ideal, but the difficulty is that confirming information is more salient in my memory than disconfirming.
On the other hand, filtered evidence is still evidence, and a lack of outside evidence can be a sign that there's no good confirming evidence. (Or, in this case, just a sign that the poster is new around here.)