Your attitude makes me happy, thank you. :)
It's the most basic rationalist skill there is, in my opinion, but for some reason it's not much talked about here. I call it "thinking like the universe" as opposed to "thinking like a human". It means you remove yourself from the picture, you forget all about your favourite views and you stop caring about the implications of your answer since those should not impact the truth of the matter, and describe the situation in purely factual terms. You don't follow any specific chain of logic towards finding an answer: You instead allow the answer to naturally flow from the facts.
It means you don't ask "which facts argue in favour of my view and which against?", but "what are the facts?"
It means you don't ask "What is my hypothesis?", you ask "which hypotheses flow naturally from the facts?"
It means you don't ask "What do I believe?" but "what would an intelligent person believe given these facts?"
It means you don't ask "which hypothesis do I believe is true?", but "how does the probability mass naturally divide itself over competing hypotheses based on the evidence?"
It means you don't ask "How can I test this hypothesis?" but "Which test would maximally distinguish between competing hypotheses?"
It means you never ever ask who has the "burden of proof".
And so on and so forth. I see it as the most fundamental skill because it allows you to ask the right questions, and if you start with the wrong question it really doesn't matter what you do with it afterwards.
I think I understand now, thank you.
Do you follow any specific practices in order to internalise this approach, or do you simply endeavour to apply it whenever you remember?
New chapter!
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 102.
There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: