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NancyLebovitz comments on Less Wrong Book Club and Study Group - Less Wrong
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As a warm-up, and to indicate how I intend to prompt discussion (subject to the group's feedback) I have posted a summary of the Preface. (ETA: for instance, implications of this method are that it's up to participants to check back on the post from time to time to see if new summaries have been posted; then after reading the parts summarized, come back and answer this comment. Does that work?)
I will start work today on a summary of as much of Chapter 1 as might make for a nice bite-sized chunk to discuss, and post that in a few days, or sooner if the discussion on the Preface dies down quickly.
Discussion question for the Preface: can you think of further examples of the type of "old ideas" Jaynes refers to?
(http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/204/81-Words): For some time, the only homosexuals who were studied were in prison or insane asylums. It took a good bit of work and some risk to get the word out that there were homosexuals living non-pathological lives.
However, I'm not sure this is the sort of thing Jaynes had in mind-- the old ideas are shaping which data gets collected, so it's not an example of re-examining the same data set. On the other hand, no amount of study of inmates in prisons and insane asylums could have established that there were homosexuals living ordinary lives.
No, I think this is right on target, and it reminds me of Yvain's post on "disease".
Cataloging a particular behavior as a pathology leads to "hidden inferences", and no amount of new data can lead to correct conclusions without first challenging those among such hidden inferences which happen to be false. We could ask, "what data are we failing to collect on causes of obesity owing to our prevailing model of obesity"?
We could also ask "what data are we failing to collect about the risks of intentional weight loss because of our prevailing model of obesity?".