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hegemonicon comments on Why You're Stuck in a Narrative - Less Wrong
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That portion could probably stand to be clarified - at the very least I should provide a link to what I'm referring to: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical
The point is to make your explanations have the possibility to increase your knowledge, rather than just satisfy your explanation-itch. If they can equally explain all outcomes, they aren't really explanations.
To use Eliezer's favorite example, phlogiston "feels" like an explanation for why things burn - but it doesn't actually effect what you expect to see happen in the world.
An explanation cannot increase your knowledge.Your knowledge can only increase by observation. Increasing your knowledge is a decision theory problem (exploration/exploitation for example).
Phlogiston explains why some categories of things burn and some don't. Phlogiston predicts that dry wood will always burn when heated to a certain temperature. Phlogiston explains why different kind of things burn as opposed to sometime burn and sometimes not burn. It explains that if you separate a piece of woods in smaller pieces, every smaller piece will also burn.
To clarify my original point, the problem isn't the narrative. The narrative is a heuristic, it's a method to update from an observation by remembering a simple unimodal distribution centered on the narrative (what I think most likely happened, how confident I am)
Edited my reply to correct and clarify (though I'll pass on debating the merits of phlogiston theory).
After re-reading your original comment (it took me a while to parse it) I generally agree with your points. In particular I think "The bug is discarding the rest of the probability distribution" is a good way of summarizing the problem, and something I'll be mulling over.