Benya Fallenstein

I mean, that’s so damn clean. He’s citing evidence as proof there is no evidence.

Not quite the same, but similar mood: since there is no evidence, we thought we'd check if we could reinterpret the evidence to not be evidence.

Although no evidence suggests that [norovirus] is transmitted via the airborne route [9], the importance of this route has been suggested by several published reports [10]. [...]

To explore in greater detail the possibility of fomite versus airborne transmission of noroviruses, we reassessed the evidence in support of airborne transmission in a norovirus outbreak at a hotel restaurant in the UK in 1998 [21] by testing whether the alternative fomite transmission route could

Where does 'interaction' fit in all of this anyway?

Logan:

it somehow fits into the heart of deep mastery [from "Knowing"]

Ooh huh hmmm!

I had missed this before, but… I think achieving deep mastery is actually not the goal of {the part of my work I consider most important}. Or, to be more precise, it's not the job of this part of my work to produce deep mastery. I think.

(The Knowing article describes deep mastery as "extensive familiarity, lots of factual knowledge, rich predictive and explanatory models, and also practical mastery in a wide variety of situations".)

The job of this part of my work is to make contact at all, and to nurture... (read more)

the conversation with robin you quoted did feel relevant, but the parent comment felt like it was too focused in on math and thereby somewhat orthogonal to or missing the point of what i was trying to figure out. (the real thing i'm interested in isn't even about math but about philosophical intuitions.)

this made me want to try to say the thing differently, this time using the concept of gears-level models:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/B7P97C27rvHPz3s9B/gears-in-understanding

(maybe everything i'm saying below is obvious already, but then again, maybe it'll help.)

suppose that you are looking at a drawing of a simple mechanism, like the second image in the article above, which i'll try to reproduce here:

if the drawing... (read 610 more words →)

Given our discussion on the "territory" essay about how the "in contact with the territory vs. all in the map" distinction has been confusing me, I've been trying to find a way to think about the "observing vs. merely seeing" distinction without identifying it with the other one.

{My first attempt to phrase it that seems to be actually at all helping with my confusion} is this: "Observation (in the relevant sense) is bringing my {anticipations / implicit models} in contact with something that might {contradict / resist / collide with / set / correct / change} them in a way that would make them better reflect the territory." (Where by... (read more)

This comment is about something I'm confused about, and I'm sufficiently confused about it that I can't write it as a clearly-articulated question or statement. Its current state is more like a confused question that my brain in trying to untangle as I'm reading this sequence. So I'll probably meander, and the meandering probably won't come together into a clear satisfying thing by the end of this comment.

A big reason I'm interested in Logan-style naturalism is that you (Logan) frequently say things about it that resonate with ways in which I approach my own work. The most salient instance is your concept of "pre-conceptual intimacy":

In pre-conceptual intimacy, they're making

So I feel like the internet has made people think there are no good people to look up to, and this makes it harder to trust new people.

This strongly clicked for me. It feels like there is more to say around this (and I don't know what / don't know how to say it yet), but this feels like part of the puzzle.

[Added:] Actually, perhaps it seems even more central to me that it feels like the same thing that has made people think there are no good people to look up to also has made have a decreased sense of looking up to institutional cultures. Like, my inner simulator imagines that... (read more)