[ExI] Augmentations to Science /was Re: Drugs and creativity

[Will Steinberg]

Off the top of my head, maybe a candidate is what appears to be to be a
paradox in statistics.  I can't really explain it so I'll give two examples:

If you vote for a candidate, that one vote is basically worthless.  But if
you convince a million people to vote for a candidate, those votes gain a
different kind of value.  The question is sort of:  If you're one of those
million people being convinced to vote, how should you think of the value
of your vote?  Does it become more important to vote now that you're part
of that million?  It could almost be argued that now it's less important to
vote because other people will en masse for your candidate.  I'm sure this
problem can be lexically pared down to a more parsimonious statement, it's
related to levels of abstraction and whether a hypothetical,
future-intended action on a higher level affects the value of the lower
level actions it's comprised of.  Also related:  If I make a bracket
tournament of everyone on earth and the winner is determined by coin flip,
I will necessarily produce a winner who has won every flip.  The chance of
that is miniscule and I believe equal to 1/(people in the competition).  So
I can, by performing the tournament, create precisely the theoretical
distribution of winners and losers to a number of coin flips.

I think statistical questions like that, related to scale, level of
abstraction, and observer position, are "psychedelic" problems.  I'll call
those statistical relativity, but someone let me know if what I mentioned
has been addressed already.

Another problem regards insight, and how to hypothetically measure it.  If
you have an insight that gives you information much more quickly than an
experiment producing the same result, how can we verify and validate the
truthiness of this insight?

In my mind (psychedelic) insight has a place alongside science as an
information gathering tool, and perhaps a value similar to p value could be
used to show the strength of an insight.  Thus insights with low enough
value could be used as data.

To me, that seems almost predicated by the creation and study of
"artificial insight".  I guess it would be a computer program that made
guesses using data, though I don't exactly know how to randomize that in
the same way as human insight.

So yeah those are my two for now: statistical level-of-abstraction
paradoxes, and the nature of insight, what it is, how it works, whether it
can be incorporated into theories as it's own form of earmarked derived
data, whether the scientific discovery of the nature of insight a) is
possible; b) would nullify or supplant the abilities of insight.

I almost sense another paradox in the 'artificial insight box'.  It's
something like, if we created that box, if it had an insight, then knowing
the derivation of that insight it would immediately be able to come up with
a better one, ie the insight would be superseded even as it was created.
That paradox leads me to think, almost, that we can't build the insight box
without building a box that made absolute conclusions from given data which
were not really insights in the traditional sense because they would be
proven true completely.  I can see why this stuff occupies so much of R.
Penrose's thinking.

Sorry for rambling, writing this on mobile as a one-off.  But those are my
two for now, insight and statistical LoA.
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