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raptortech97 comments on Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions - Less Wrong
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What would you have had these biologists use instead? Would you prefer they had no model? It seems clear to me, though I may be wrong, that these scientists had a model (elan vital), and when later evidence came along (modern biology?), they discarded it in favor of a different model. Would you have them instead have picked a different model in the first place? Or have no model at all?
Well, if by "no model" you mean something like the contemporary folk model of biology ("Blood is what keeps you alive, we're not quite sure how though, but in general try not to lose your blood"), then elan vital is definitely worse, in that it (a) adds no new information but (b) sounds wiser, and therefore harder to unseat.
Are you suggesting that we apply a punishment to any theory that sounds wise? Or that we apply a punishment only for those that also satisfy (a)?
Well, ideally we ignore b and focus only on a. B only matters in the context of being a more virulent meme.
It may make sense to apply some penalty to the logodds of "profound ideas", to compensate for the bias.
Likewise, maybe we should assume that beautiful people are stupid to compensate for the halo effect---though that one is a bit trickier, because IQ actually is correlated with attractiveness, just not as strongly as people tend to assume.