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JGWeissman comments on Reductionism - Less Wrong
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Reductionism is great. The main problem is that by itself it tells us nothing new. Science depends on hypothesis generation, and reductionism says nothing about how to do that in a rational way, only how to test hypotheses rationally. For some reason the creative side of science -- and I use the word "creative" in the generative sense -- is never addressed by methodology in the same way falsifiability is:
http://emergentfool.com/2010/02/26/why-falsifiability-is-insufficient-for-scientific-reasoning/
We are at a stage of historical enlightenment where more and better reductionism is producing marginal returns. To be even less wrong, we might spend more time on the hypothesis generation side of the equation.
You may be interested in Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality, in which Eliezer suggests that science is a way of identifying the good theories produced by a community of scientists who on their own have some capacity to produce theories, and that Bayesian rationality is a systematic way of producing good theories.
Oh, and Welcome to Less Wrong! You have identified an important point in your first few comments, and I hope that is predictor of good things to come.
An automated theory generator would be worth a nobel.
So, the introduction of "automated" to this discussion feels like a complete nonsequitor to me. Can you clarify why you introduce it?
If you have a "systematic" way of "producing" something, (JGWeissman) surely you can automate it.
Ah. OK, thanks for clarifying.
I could call a procedure "systematic" even if one of the steps used a human's System 1 as an oracle, in which case it'd be hard to automate that as per Moravec's paradox.
I would not call such a procedure systematic. Who would? Here's a system for success as an author: first have a brilliant idea...it reads like a joke, doesn't it?
I wasn't thinking of something that extreme; more like the kind of tasks people do on Mechanical Turk.
Is there anything non systematic by that definition? In what way does it promote Bayesianism to call it systematic?
Well, I have no idea if it "promotes Bayesianism" or not, but when someone talks to me about a systematic approach to doing something in normal conversation, I understand it to be as opposed to a scattershot/intuitive approach.
For example, if I want to test a piece of software, I can make a list of all the integration points and inputs and key use cases and build a matrix of those lists and build test cases for each cell in that matrix, or I can just construct a bunch of test cases as they occur to me. The former approach is more systematic, even if I can't necessarily automate the test cases.
I realize that your understanding of "systematic" is different from this... if I've understood you, if I can't automate the test cases then this approach is not systematic on your account.
See TheOtherDave.
See E.T. Jaynes calling certain frequentist techniques “ad-hockeries”. EDIT: BTW, I didn't have Bayesianism in mind when I replied to this ancestor -- I should stop replying to comments without reading their ancestors first.
It feels like you use 'questions' a lot more than usual, and it looks very much like a rhetorical device because you inject counter points into your questions. Can you clarify why you do it? (see what I did there?)
Sidenote: Actually, questions are often a sneaky rhetorical device - you can modify the statement in the way of your choosing, and then ask questions about that. You see that in political debates all the time.
Agreed that questions can be used in underhanded ways, but this example does seem more helpful at focusing the conversation than something like:
That could easily go in other directions; this makes clear that the question is "how did we get from A to B?" while sharing control of the topic change / clarification.
Sure, I'd be happy to: because I want answers to those questions.
For example, whowhowho's introduction of "automated" did in fact feel like a nonsequitor to me, and I wanted to understand better why they'd introduced it, to see whether there was some clever reasoning there I'd failed to follow. Their answer to my question clarified that, and I thanked them for the clarification, and we were done.
You asked a question.
I answered it.
It really isn't that complicated.
That said, I suspect from context that you mean to imply that you did something sneaky and rhetorical just then, just as you seem to believe that I do something sneaky and rhetorical when I ask questions.
If that's true, then no, I guess I don't see what you did there.
Yes. So are statements.
Here is one, completely automated.
Has this point ever been answered? If we are content with the desired output appearing somewhere along the line - as opposed to the start - then the simplest theory of everything would be printing enough digits of pi, and our universe would be described somewhere down the line.
(See slides 11, 12 here.)
Solomonoff induction is about putting probability distributions on observations - you're looking for the combination of the simplest program that puts the highest probability on observations. Technically, the original SI doesn't talk about causal models you're embedded in, just programs that assign probabilities to experiences.
Generalizing somewhat, for QM as it appears to humans, the generalized-SI-selected hypothesis would be something along the lines of one program that extrapolated the wavefunction, then another program that looked for people inside it and translated the underlying physics into the "observed data" from their perspective, then put probabilities on the sequences of data corresponding to integral squared modulus. Note that you also need an interface from atoms to experiences just to e.g. translate a classical atomic theory of matter into "I saw a blue sky", and an implicit theory of anthropics/sum-probability-measure too if the classical universe is large enough to have more than one copy of you.
Thanks for this. I'll mull it over.
Here's a rebuttal: http://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong/comments/17y819/lw_uncensored_thread/c89ymip .
It isn't at all clear why all that would add up to something simpler than a single world theory
Single-world theories still have to compute the wavefunction, identify observers, and compute the integrated squared modulus. Then they have to pick out a single observer with probability proportional to the integral, peek ahead into the future to determine when a volume of probability amplitude will no longer strongly causally interact with that observer's local blob, and eliminate that blob from the wavefunction. Then translating the reductionist model into experiences requires the same complexity as before.
Basically, it's not simpler for the same reason that in a spatially big universe it wouldn't be 'simpler' to have a computer program that picked out one observer, calculated when any photon or bit of matter was moving away and wasn't going to hit anything that would reflect it back, and then eliminated that matter.