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

[William Flynn Wallace]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 4:01 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> I think there is a fundamental difference between insight and p-values.
> The first is about how to generate a hypothesis, the second about how to
> test it (after an experiment or observations ).
>
> In creativity there is both divergent thinking and convergent thinking -
> come up with new things, weed out the bad things,  and build the things for
> real. Some people are good at some steps, but not others. Boost the weak
> steps, and they become more creative. Psychedelics may help the first step
> or even cause a transvaluation that enables new ways of evaluation. But
> other tools exist for other steps. Being meta enough to figure out which
> ones need boosting is also a skill.
>
> P-values for all their faults is an example of a tool that helped the
> scientific creative process. There are many more, like bayesian methods,
> for that step. Maybe we need more metascience to evaluate where we need
> more tools for our projects.
>
>
>
>
> Sent from Samsung tablet
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Will Steinberg
> Date:2015/12/20 17:52 (GMT+01:00)
> To: ExI chat list
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Augmentations to Science /was Re: Drugs and creativity
>
> 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.
>

​I know one thing for sure we don't need:  to return to the discredited (
in psychology, anyway) method of introspection.  Anders has it right:  get
insights or epiphanies any way you want to, then subject them to empirical
experiment.  Subjective 'truth' just has no place in science.  Sorry.

Bill w  (Max, in no way shape or form did I mean to patronize you)​


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