In my own experience, self skepticism isn't sufficient. It's bloody useful of course, but it's also an exceptional time sink -- occasionally to the point where I'll forget to actually think of solutions to the problem.

Does anyone have any algorithms they use to balance self-skepticism with actually solving the problem?

Hi all,

Long time lurker, first time poster. I've read some of the Sequences, though I fully intend to re-read and read on.

I'm an undergrad at present, looking to participate in a trend I've been observing that's bring some of the rigor and predictive power of the hard sciences to linguistics.

I'm particularly interested in how language evolved, and under what physical/biological/computational constraints; What that implies about the neural mechanisms behind human behavior; and how to use those two to construct a predictive and quantitative theory of linguistic behavior.

I go to a Liberal Arts college (I started out with a bit more of a Lit major bent), where, after being disillusioned with the somewhat more philosophical side of linguistics (mid-term, no less), I ended up taking an extracurricular dive into the physical sciences just to stay sane. Then a friend recomended HPMOR, and thence I discovered LessWrong, where I've been happily lurking for some time.

I decided it would be useful to actually participate. So here I am.

Yes, but OTOH the “evolutionary processes operating over centuries, millennia, and longer” took place in environments different from where we live nowadays.