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gwern comments on Open Thread, November 1 - 7, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: witzvo 02 November 2013 04:37PM

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Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 November 2013 05:40:46PM 9 points [-]

I'm reminded of many years ago, a coworker coming into my office and asking me a question about the design of a feature that interacts with our tax calculation.

So she and I created this whole whiteboard flowchart working out the design, at the end of which I said "Hrm. So, at a high level, this seems OK. That said, you should definitely talk to Mark about this, because Mark knows a lot more about the tax code than I do, and he might see problems I missed. For example, Mark will probably notice that this bit here will fail when $condition applies, which I... um... completely failed to notice?"

I could certainly describe that as having a "Mark" in my head who is smarter about tax-code-related designs than I am, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with describing it that way if that makes me more comfortable or provides some other benefit.

But "Mark" in this case would just be pointing to a subset of "Dave", just as "Dave's fantasies about aliens" does.

Comment author: gwern 07 November 2013 08:04:37PM 6 points [-]

See also 'rubberducking' and previous discussions of this on LW. My basic theory is that reasoning was developed for adversarial purposes, and by rubberducking you are essentially roleplaying as an 'adversary' which triggers deeper processing (if we ever get brain imaging of system I vs system II thinking, I'd expect that adversarial thinking triggers system II more compared to 'normal' self-centered thinking).

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 November 2013 08:21:14PM 3 points [-]

Yes. Indeed, I suspect I've told this story before on LW in just such a discussion.

I don't necessarily buy your account -- it might just be that our brains are simply not well-integrated systems, and enabling different channels whereby parts of our brains can be activated and/or interact with one another (e.g., talking to myself, singing, roleplaying different characters, getting up and walking around, drawing, etc.) gets different (and sometimes better) results.

This is also related to the circumlocution strategy for dealing with aphasia.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 02 January 2014 02:29:17PM *  1 point [-]

My basic theory is that reasoning was developed for adversarial purposes

Obligatory link.