It's not that reductionism is wrong, but rather that it's only part of the story. Additional understanding can be gleaned through a bottom-up, emergent explanation which is orthogonal to the top-down reductionist explanation of the same system.
It is important to take seriously the reality of higher level models (maps). Or alternatively to admit that they are just as unreal, but also just as important to understanding, as the lower level models. As Aaron Boyden points out, it is not a foregone conclusion that there is a most basic level.
Eliezer,
Humanity is facing multiple species-level extinction threats right now, and I gotta tell ya, there ain't a lot of people steppin' forward.
While I am hesitant to be part of the problem by sounding like an apologist or offering rationalizations, I have personal reasons for hope. Fittingly, one of the reasons for hope is that the process of evolution/emergence seems to introduce and sustain latent heterogeneity -- in the gene pool, in the idea pool, etc. This heterogeneity acts as a hedge, making the evolving population of agents more robust as a sy...
Beinhocker argues in Origin of Wealth that the appropriate unit of selection is not the corporation but rather the generalized concept of business plan. While Elezier's preconditions for evolution are a bit more extensive than the normal set, I believe Beinhocker's business plans (not to be confused with the artifacts that float around Sand Hill Road) meet all of Elezier's criteria, and hence the population evolves via natural selection.
On public proof...
1) "Order of Bayescraft" not likely to be seen as anything other than a self-help cult, like Scientology or Landmark.
2) A single spectacularly huge public success will be unconvincing and considered just a normal scientific breakthrough or luck.
3) If there existed techniques that could be taught easily, would they not already have been discovered? And what about the more-harm-than-good landmines that exist everywhere?
To call a de-biasing program a success, one or more individuals would have to show repeated scientific breakthro...
Why has no serious effort been mounted to recruit and appeal to women in this forum? Relatedly, what forms of bias are typical of male thinking/communication and what forms are typical of female (or is this a false dichotomy) ?
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Matthew C's comment appears to be sarcastic and thus I interpret it as meaning the opposite. Regardless, I will request that a discussion be stared on the different sorts of biases that exist in a reductionist (i.e. standard scientific) paradigm. This is a hard one to discuss given everyone's background and the nature of human language. Relatedly, what does a complex systems or emergent paradigm tell us about reductionist biases?
I didn't know whether to post this reply to "Black swans from the future" or here, so I'll just reference it:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/04/black_swans_fro.html#comment-65404590
Good post, Eliezer.
From the Wikipedia definition for "reductionism":
"Reductionism can either mean (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents."
and
"The limit of reductionism's usefulness stems from emergent properties of complex systems which are more common at certain levels of organization."