TrevinPeterson — LessWrong

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Replying toCompartmentalization as a passive phenomenon

Compartmentalization as a passive phenomenon

So my theory is that much of compartmentalization is simply because the search space is so large that people don't end up seeing that there might be a connection between two domains. Even if they do see the potential, or if it's explicitly pointed out to them, they might still not know enough about the domain in question (such as in the example of heavy boots), or they might find the proposed connection implausible.

If a person's knowledge is highly compartmentalized, and consists of these three facts:

A human being walked across the moon.
There are small rocks on the surface.
The moon is a planetary body.

without any educational background, would they choose the right... (read more)

Replying toFor progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books

TrevinPeterson16y

For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books

Rediscovering is not as prestigious as discovering, because it is not as difficult and does not signal intellectual greatness.

There is a difference between rediscovering and old idea, and adapting an old idea to a new situation. Simply rediscovering an old idea does not grant much prestige. Austrians are constantly coming across Hayek quotes and parading them around as definitive solutions to current problems. The problem is that these ideas are every bit as untestable as they were on the day Hayek wrote them. A confirmation bias leads Austrians to see them as Truth, while Keysians remain skeptical.

When old ideas are adapted into a testable form they endow a great deal of prestige. There are all sorts of anecdotes about this happening, such as Henry Ford taking the idea of an assembly line from Oldsmobile and mixing it with his observations from a meat factory, to create the moving assembly line. The difference is that this is a testable idea that creates immediate results.

Replying toFor progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books

TrevinPeterson16y

For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books

progress means replacing one pile of sludge with another fashionable sludge-pile of similar quality.

The methods available to test these various hypotheses seem to have more of an impact on their prominence, than any objective measure of truth. Classical mechanics conformed to observations and could be confirmed by various tests. This led to widespread adoption until, observations were be made that did not fit the theories. Often the theories are available and cover various possible outcomes, all justified by the intuition offered by the current, yet untestable, theories.

This is where the social sciences run into difficulty. Predictions made by the social sciences are confirmed or disproved by the available... (read more)