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Johnicholas comments on Lights, Camera, Action! - Less Wrong
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Comments (55)
Didn't we try introspection, back around gestalt psychology, and it was a dismal failure?
Why does Alicorn think this time around will be different?
I'd be interested in your unpacking that claim of a trial and failure. I lack the background to know with precision what events you are referring to.
What was tried, what was it aiming to do, in what ways did it fail?
Sigh. I hate being handed the initiative like this; it feels like rope to hang myself with.
My recollection is that the Gestalt psychologists believed that they could gain information through a technique called introspection, but they couldn't. Their results depended fiercely on the dominant theory of the laboratory where they studied.
Unless I am mistaken, behaviorism in psychology was partly a reaction against the failures of introspection, and to some extent cognitive science (e.g. Simon and Newell's Protocol Analysis) was a reaction against excessive behaviorism.
As I understand the current scientific practice, introspection should definitely not be believed. It can be recorded as verbal behavior to be explained, but analyzing the data that you get this way is labor-intensive. So researchers usually use techniques that produce data which is easier to analyze (and get a paper out of). For example, various forms of timing tests like the IAT, or questionnaires with lots of confusion questions, either of which can be put into one of those nice Fisher's ANOVA structures.
My prejudice is that armchair-only techniques have been well explored with only moderate successes, and we should be looking for more physical, external, buildable techniques for rationality.
Hey, we're just conversing, not arguing. Or, not arguing yet. };->
So, if you've got a single subject (yourself), and the goal is not to write a paper but to become more rational (which is labor-intensive anyway), introspection is legitimate?
No. As far as I know, introspection is a good way to convince yourself that you have become more rational, and not a good way to learn things or become more rational.
Someone recently tweeted about "effort shock" - discovering the amount of effort to accomplish something worthwhile, analogous to sticker shock.
Going to school and getting a degree and going into research and writing some bad papers in order to keep your job long enough to write some good papers might be the kind of effort necessary to improve the state of the art in human rationality - though I'd love to hear about faster ways.
Gestalt therapy treated introspection as the best possible way to learn about anything, without considering that conclusions might be flawed. Alicorn's recommending that it be just one data-mining technique among many.