Bad news: nobody can teach you this. Good news: you can do it on your own! It is, in fact, the only way. This is the story of how I learned to think for myself.
I'm not being condescending. I think re-examining preconceptions whenever you get new information is the hallmark of maturity. Just remember that information can have bias and deception, depending on where it comes from.
But it sounds like you have a good methodology. I would recommend, however, that you do talk to subject matter experts at some point in the process. A lot of what's out there can misrepresent, for example, what a religion actually teaches. And there are lots of things in medicine and physics that previous work has already disproven that is still widely believed based on being plausible. Consider it just another data point, but one worth considering.
> Just remember that information can have bias and deception
yes! I keep thinking about how, I almost want a mental map where every piece of information is tagged with metadata (my % confidence in it, and the source from which it came). I think that matters for when I'm using it as a building block for other beliefs. And also, if one day I discover that that source was not as reliable as I thought, I can go back and inspect what all was built on top of that (I think the minds of people like Geoffrey Hinton describes do this to some extent, maybe)
> And there are lots of things in medicine and physics that previous work has already disproven that is still widely believed based on being plausible
this is interesting! when you say 'widely believed' do you mean, outside the field? believed by non-experts even though all the experts know it is not true?
those are always interesting cases when I encounter them and I feel like they are a "low hanging fruit", to try and explain it to laypeople in ways that make sense, to give people a new mental model that is more accurate/closer to the consensus within the field
(I'm curious if you have any examples! I can't think of any at the top of my head)
I found this really interesting. It was cool to read about your journey and what the experience was like!
You mention politics - this is an area where I feel intellectually intimidated and wouldn't know where to 'start', for lack of a better word. I have a brother-in-law who is a PhD political scientist and has SO MUCH fucking background knowledge and experience that it almost feels futile to try to operate on the same level. So in this kind of arena, where you're starting out and feel the weight of that information asymmetry, how would you go about starting to form and execute these sorts of predictions/experiments/etc?
Forget about the information asymmetry, just start immediately. Accept that you know nothing & make it fun & rewarding to figure out any answer. I think the easiest way to do this is to just ask questions of real people on twitter (anonymous if you feel uncomfortable asking dumb questions like I did)
We don't have a "compiler" in the arena of politics that you can check your answers with, but there is a way to do this: try to predict things. The easiest one is predict the answer someone will give to a political question. Whether it's a twitter rando or a pundit on the radio, or politicians. Like if you say "they're going to be against policy X, and they're going to say it's bad for Y reason". I think this alone can get you very far. You'll start to see patterns in who is against policies and who is for them. You'll start to build your own mental models. And you'll feel your first burst of confidence when your own mental model, that YOU made from scratch, validates something that PhD's are writing in their books.
Then your brother in law will say, "oh I see you've read theory ABC, that author is really smart" and you'll say "no, I've never heard of that, I just talked to a bunch of twitter rando's" and that is exactly what keeps happening to me, with my PhD friend sociologist friends. I'm reinventing expert theories from scratch. It's only hard if you're trying to do it with very little feedback mechanisms.
(I have SO much more to say on this, feel free to ping me on twitter as you go on this journey!!)
“Trust no one above the compiler” put in eng terms something I keep coming back to: reality rewards alignment with “what is.” Confronting reality with a thing — idea, business, etc — and seeing if it works is the *only* test. Ofc, this raises a lot of question about procedure, how you know if it’s true, etc, but it’s true.
Also, a meta comment: this seems like a first principles discovery of David Deutsch’s entire philosophy: things are knowable, knowledge has infinite potential for growth and improvement, and you do this by pursuing good explanations.
YES. It feels important to me to spread this message because (1) it is a WINNING strategy. whoever does it will make their life better, for whatever goals they want to pursue (2) even if they are my enemy, I want them to have this. Because, when they have greater contact with reality, I have a greater surface area to communicate with them. We're more likely to find win-win solutions, or trade instead of engage in war.
I think it's important for people to both understand this message AND translate it. It clicks for me & other engineers to tell them that, hey guys, politics, philosophy, spirituality, ALL of that can be as rigorous as your experience with a compiler. This doesn't make sense to all populations, it must be translated.
> David Deutsch
people keep recommending David, I'm starting to see why! I think I independently landed on the same thing here (which is validating, gnostic peer review!)
I think the best way to learn this is to just do it. And you already are capable of this, as a human being who has gotten this far in life. When you have a conversation with another human being, you have a mental model of who they are, and how they might respond to what you say (that's how you choose what words to type).
I think the missing thing is a lot of times, people fail/get an unexpected response, and try to update the model (just reflect on why it failed, and try something different. Explicitly articulate why you think it failed, and test that). It's like being a scientist, but about your own life.
- you target your predictions towards anything you're curious about OR struggling with. For me this was, "I don't understand why there's so much evil in the world" or more specifically, "if we know how to fix the country/economy, why are there people against it? What do they want?"
so I just made my best prediction ("they are just evil/bad people") and went around testing it (if they are truly evil, then when I talk to them on twitter, they will have no answer/will be unkind etc). That prediction failed, that's not what happened. So now I update the model, and try again. The new model may be "they are misinformed". Or "the solutions I thought were simple have actually been tried before, and did not work".
mm, thank you. the model is basically something that happens on its own then. i do wish there was a way to systematically collate the knowledge, but explicitly articulating the failure pretty much is that. I guess I just need to be more willing to collect failure and study all of it. tough, but makes sense.
The flushed out post is really good, important take away for me was.
"You need not be thinking for yourself (or reinventing the wheel) for everything, just do that for things that matter for you, or you can see very huge upside with low downside for it"
something that flashed my mind was, "when creating a opinion for oneself on something first dig for information on it (nuts and bolts of what you are doing, something real hard that everybody agrees on that, and common "herd" logic is also good place to start) using that information come to a baseline opinion/mental model of your own, and iterate over the mental model with new opinions or information.", opinions and mental models of others have additional information which might be beneficial to them but noise/harmful for the new user of the mental model/opinion
> opinions and mental models of others have additional information which might be beneficial to them but noise/harmful for the new user of the mental model/opinion
I think my despair with understanding politics was because, I thought if person A said something, that conflicts with person B, I had to either fully believe A's model, or B's model. And neither of their models seemed correct/complete, so it felt like "nothing was true"
but that's not the way. it's all new pieces of information. we have our own models that we can tweak/extend
In a cosmic coincidence, right after publishing this I heard Steve Levitt talk on his latest podcast episode about "his model of how the work works" and how he tries to predict research results before he reads them!
> I’ve got a model in my head of how the world works — a broad framework for making sense of the world around me. [...] I have a habit of asking myself, “Given my model of the world, what results would I expect the study to generate?” Usually I’m pretty good at guessing what the researchers actually find. But with Ellen Langer, over and over and over, she gets results that I would never predict
(so, that's an example of the validation I keep finding: when I independently find something that someone else says is also useful for them, that's a good signal)
Congratulations. You're a scientist.
I'm not being condescending. I think re-examining preconceptions whenever you get new information is the hallmark of maturity. Just remember that information can have bias and deception, depending on where it comes from.
But it sounds like you have a good methodology. I would recommend, however, that you do talk to subject matter experts at some point in the process. A lot of what's out there can misrepresent, for example, what a religion actually teaches. And there are lots of things in medicine and physics that previous work has already disproven that is still widely believed based on being plausible. Consider it just another data point, but one worth considering.
I really appreciate your thoughtful comment!!!
> Just remember that information can have bias and deception
yes! I keep thinking about how, I almost want a mental map where every piece of information is tagged with metadata (my % confidence in it, and the source from which it came). I think that matters for when I'm using it as a building block for other beliefs. And also, if one day I discover that that source was not as reliable as I thought, I can go back and inspect what all was built on top of that (I think the minds of people like Geoffrey Hinton describes do this to some extent, maybe)
> And there are lots of things in medicine and physics that previous work has already disproven that is still widely believed based on being plausible
this is interesting! when you say 'widely believed' do you mean, outside the field? believed by non-experts even though all the experts know it is not true?
those are always interesting cases when I encounter them and I feel like they are a "low hanging fruit", to try and explain it to laypeople in ways that make sense, to give people a new mental model that is more accurate/closer to the consensus within the field
(I'm curious if you have any examples! I can't think of any at the top of my head)
Widely believed sometimes outside, sometimes even inside, especially in medicine.
Really liked the post!
Your note about predictions & updating (& some other phrases in this post) reminded me of the LW post “Making beliefs pay rent”: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences
Should be worth the read if you haven’t yet
I found this really interesting. It was cool to read about your journey and what the experience was like!
You mention politics - this is an area where I feel intellectually intimidated and wouldn't know where to 'start', for lack of a better word. I have a brother-in-law who is a PhD political scientist and has SO MUCH fucking background knowledge and experience that it almost feels futile to try to operate on the same level. So in this kind of arena, where you're starting out and feel the weight of that information asymmetry, how would you go about starting to form and execute these sorts of predictions/experiments/etc?
Forget about the information asymmetry, just start immediately. Accept that you know nothing & make it fun & rewarding to figure out any answer. I think the easiest way to do this is to just ask questions of real people on twitter (anonymous if you feel uncomfortable asking dumb questions like I did)
We don't have a "compiler" in the arena of politics that you can check your answers with, but there is a way to do this: try to predict things. The easiest one is predict the answer someone will give to a political question. Whether it's a twitter rando or a pundit on the radio, or politicians. Like if you say "they're going to be against policy X, and they're going to say it's bad for Y reason". I think this alone can get you very far. You'll start to see patterns in who is against policies and who is for them. You'll start to build your own mental models. And you'll feel your first burst of confidence when your own mental model, that YOU made from scratch, validates something that PhD's are writing in their books.
Then your brother in law will say, "oh I see you've read theory ABC, that author is really smart" and you'll say "no, I've never heard of that, I just talked to a bunch of twitter rando's" and that is exactly what keeps happening to me, with my PhD friend sociologist friends. I'm reinventing expert theories from scratch. It's only hard if you're trying to do it with very little feedback mechanisms.
(I have SO much more to say on this, feel free to ping me on twitter as you go on this journey!!)
Love this so much. Thank you for the thoughtful reply. You may very well hear from me on Twitter :)
This was excellent.
“Trust no one above the compiler” put in eng terms something I keep coming back to: reality rewards alignment with “what is.” Confronting reality with a thing — idea, business, etc — and seeing if it works is the *only* test. Ofc, this raises a lot of question about procedure, how you know if it’s true, etc, but it’s true.
Also, a meta comment: this seems like a first principles discovery of David Deutsch’s entire philosophy: things are knowable, knowledge has infinite potential for growth and improvement, and you do this by pursuing good explanations.
> reality rewards alignment with “what is.”
YES. It feels important to me to spread this message because (1) it is a WINNING strategy. whoever does it will make their life better, for whatever goals they want to pursue (2) even if they are my enemy, I want them to have this. Because, when they have greater contact with reality, I have a greater surface area to communicate with them. We're more likely to find win-win solutions, or trade instead of engage in war.
I think it's important for people to both understand this message AND translate it. It clicks for me & other engineers to tell them that, hey guys, politics, philosophy, spirituality, ALL of that can be as rigorous as your experience with a compiler. This doesn't make sense to all populations, it must be translated.
> David Deutsch
people keep recommending David, I'm starting to see why! I think I independently landed on the same thing here (which is validating, gnostic peer review!)
excuse me
?? regarding making predictions or updating models or all of it
-what aspect(s) do you target with your predictions in order to most quickly figure something out?
-how do you consolidate your knowledge into a "model" + update it?
especially in situations where you have some murky preexisting understanding
(as it sounds robust, is a mental model some specific structure i'm unaware of?)
I think the best way to learn this is to just do it. And you already are capable of this, as a human being who has gotten this far in life. When you have a conversation with another human being, you have a mental model of who they are, and how they might respond to what you say (that's how you choose what words to type).
I think the missing thing is a lot of times, people fail/get an unexpected response, and try to update the model (just reflect on why it failed, and try something different. Explicitly articulate why you think it failed, and test that). It's like being a scientist, but about your own life.
- you target your predictions towards anything you're curious about OR struggling with. For me this was, "I don't understand why there's so much evil in the world" or more specifically, "if we know how to fix the country/economy, why are there people against it? What do they want?"
so I just made my best prediction ("they are just evil/bad people") and went around testing it (if they are truly evil, then when I talk to them on twitter, they will have no answer/will be unkind etc). That prediction failed, that's not what happened. So now I update the model, and try again. The new model may be "they are misinformed". Or "the solutions I thought were simple have actually been tried before, and did not work".
mm, thank you. the model is basically something that happens on its own then. i do wish there was a way to systematically collate the knowledge, but explicitly articulating the failure pretty much is that. I guess I just need to be more willing to collect failure and study all of it. tough, but makes sense.
anything for if you failed and feel like you really truly don't know shit about it? besides ask someone else
The flushed out post is really good, important take away for me was.
"You need not be thinking for yourself (or reinventing the wheel) for everything, just do that for things that matter for you, or you can see very huge upside with low downside for it"
something that flashed my mind was, "when creating a opinion for oneself on something first dig for information on it (nuts and bolts of what you are doing, something real hard that everybody agrees on that, and common "herd" logic is also good place to start) using that information come to a baseline opinion/mental model of your own, and iterate over the mental model with new opinions or information.", opinions and mental models of others have additional information which might be beneficial to them but noise/harmful for the new user of the mental model/opinion
yes!! I love the way you explicitly put this:
> opinions and mental models of others have additional information which might be beneficial to them but noise/harmful for the new user of the mental model/opinion
I think my despair with understanding politics was because, I thought if person A said something, that conflicts with person B, I had to either fully believe A's model, or B's model. And neither of their models seemed correct/complete, so it felt like "nothing was true"
but that's not the way. it's all new pieces of information. we have our own models that we can tweak/extend
In a cosmic coincidence, right after publishing this I heard Steve Levitt talk on his latest podcast episode about "his model of how the work works" and how he tries to predict research results before he reads them!
> I’ve got a model in my head of how the world works — a broad framework for making sense of the world around me. [...] I have a habit of asking myself, “Given my model of the world, what results would I expect the study to generate?” Usually I’m pretty good at guessing what the researchers actually find. But with Ellen Langer, over and over and over, she gets results that I would never predict
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/pay-attention-your-body-will-thank-you/
(so, that's an example of the validation I keep finding: when I independently find something that someone else says is also useful for them, that's a good signal)
Great post. Fascinating to read this. I think I went through a similar journey but took quite a bit longer. Subscribed
how about posting a model for understanding people