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All of RafeFurst's Comments + Replies

My Bayesian Enlightenment
RafeFurst20

For me the key to leveling up is to question every assumption (often) and find sources of novelty regularly. I liken cognition to a hill-climbing search on the landscape of theories/models/maps that explain/predict reality. It’s easy to get stuck on peaks of local maximality. Injecting randomness creates a sort of Boltzmann machine of the mind and increases my chances of finding higher peaks.

But I have to be prepared to be more confused — and question more assumptions than I intended to — because chances are my new random placement on the landscape is i... (read more)

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Reductionism
RafeFurst50

Reductionism is great. The main problem is that by itself it tells us nothing new. Science depends on hypothesis generation, and reductionism says nothing about how to do that in a rational way, only how to test hypotheses rationally. For some reason the creative side of science -- and I use the word "creative" in the generative sense -- is never addressed by methodology in the same way falsifiability is:

http://emergentfool.com/2010/02/26/why-falsifiability-is-insufficient-for-scientific-reasoning/

We are at a stage of historical enlightenment ... (read more)

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0Morendil
Agreed: we need more posts on abductive reasoning specifically.
6JGWeissman
You may be interested in Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality, in which Eliezer suggests that science is a way of identifying the good theories produced by a community of scientists who on their own have some capacity to produce theories, and that Bayesian rationality is a systematic way of producing good theories. Oh, and Welcome to Less Wrong! You have identified an important point in your first few comments, and I hope that is predictor of good things to come.
Jack130

Really? I think of reductionism as maybe the greatest, most wildly successful abductive tool in all of history. If we can't explain some behavior or property of some object it tells us one good guess is to look to the composite parts of that thing for the answer. The only other strategy for hypothesis generation I can think of that has been comparably successful is skepticism (about evidence and testimony). "I was hallucinating." and "The guy is lying" have explained a lot of things over the years. Can anyone think of others?

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Reductionism
RafeFurst131

Agreed. Why would we believe a quark is not "emergent"? Could be turtles all the way down....

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The Futility of Emergence
RafeFurst10

Emergence is NOT the sum of the parts.

I'm curious, Eliezer, what you think of Alex Ryan's and Cosma Shalizi's definitions/formalisms of emergence?

http://www.per.marine.csiro.au/staff/Fabio.Boschetti/papers/ITprimer.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/nlin/0609011 http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/thesis/single-spaced-thesis.pdf

The both seem to be claiming that emergence is more than you are, but that could be an illusion...

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0Davorak
You ITprimer seems to disagree with your statement: ITprimer: Non-trivial interactions of individual components -> Self organization -> New behaviors labeled to have 'emerged' Where did they emerge from? The non-trivial interactions. This description runs counter to your discription "Emergence is NOT the sum of the parts." It is the sum of the non-trivial parts by the above description and a loose definition of sum.