6.9 KiB
[RT][WIP][EDU] Khosrau and Snapdragon, An Ideal Wedding - Alternately: Cosmic Square
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Author: u/FuguofAnotherWorld Roll the Dice on Fate*
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Score: 12
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Created: 2018-01-13T22:15:48
Post:
Comments:
u/None [+2] (11 minutes later)
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u/None [+11] (19 hours later)
So I'm just going to say that, prior to having read this story, this comment is really pinging my bullshit detectors, including the weirdly specific numbers (just how are you measuring mental efficiency, and what does a 1-2% increase in it even mean? How do you know it's not placebo?) and the implication that understanding the story makes you special in some way. You couch it as a net plus on the cost-benefit, but that's misleading. Cost-benefit has to take into account the possibility that the story is just mystical bs, and reading it will clutter my beliefs about the world with mystical pseudoscientific bs. I consider that cost rather high.
If you want to present this as a piece of art or fiction or whatever, that's fine, but don't wrap it in this pseudoscientific vaguely intellectual langauge unless you've got the evidence to back it up.
"This illustrates a technique I use to clear my mind" is fine.
"This illustrates a technique to terminate hanging mental threads and increase effective efficiency by 1-2%" is not fine, because it implies waaaay greater power and precision than you can realistically have without having done a pretty comprehensive study on this.
I get that you use a bunch of vascillating language like "I think" and "reasonably", but that doesn't solve the core issue, which is that this comment stinks of not-quite-cautious enough pseudoscience married to intellectual mysticism.
u/UltraRedSpectrum [+4] (20 hours later)
It might help if I were to explain it.
I wrote the story late at night and all in one sitting, after having a particularly slippery thought that I couldn't express formally and was afraid of forgetting. The next day, seeing no harm in it (since it is technically a story in and of itself, with motivations and the like), I decided to post it to the r/rational Discord server. A few people there said that they thought they had seen the thing I was trying to remember after reading the story, and one person proved it by predicting what happens next, so FuguofAnotherWorld asked if he could post it to r/r, and I said he could. However, any literal explanation should be considered in light of the fact that it's being written by someone who got their impression after reading a story I wrote to remember something I can't express in words, and is therefore something like third- or fourth-hand.
I would explain it like this: a thought can be considered as a recursive function. A recursive function must have behaviours for both its base case and its recursive case, and can't 'know' which one it's going to use going in. Likewise, in thinking (or so my thought goes) we'll try to remove uncertainty from our prediction, and, if we can't remove enough for our tastes, we'll repeat the thought with only the uncertain elements remaining. If, on thinking this next thought, there are still more uncertain elements than we're comfortable with, we'll repeat it again - and, if we can't ever remove enough uncertain elements, the thought has to be 'left open,' and never resolved.
I have no way of knowing whether this maps in any way to how brains actually work. However, I find that I'm less anxious since thinking of it in that way, because I'm considering what sort of exit case I ought to be using in my thought processes. If I have no reason to believe that considering something further will alter the conclusion I draw, then I also have no reason to consider it further, and, in letting it be, I stop worrying about it.
(That's not all the story is about. It's more like the imprint of a pattern, or something, but that's the part Fugu was referring to, and I'm not sure any of the other things actually exist as information contained in the story versus information contained in my head that the story reminds me of.)
u/None [+2] (23 hours later)
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u/None [+5] (a day later)
I do count the style more significant than substance here. The language of science must be reserved for things you can describe scientifically, or you dilute the value of that language for describing things scientifically. Tell me it's magic, tell me it's art. But don't give me a numerical estimation of change in a quality unless you can also provide an operational definition for that quality, and preferably hard data indicating a change in that quality measured by an observer with minimal bias. Rational, scientific exploration of the world does not make up the entirety of our life experience. Sometimes we have a deep, profound experience or come to a realization that we must encode in art. And that's fine. That's wonderful, even. And then we should say things like "this story is a mnemonic for a technique that helped me clear my mind, that made me feel as if I was snipping away or bringing to a proper end all the dangling mental threads that were distracting me."
Is that a bit woo woo mystical bullshit? Yes. That's fine. But it's not pretending to be something it's not.
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
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u/None [+6] (2 days later)
Yes, which is learnable by approximating and calibrating against seperate measurements or objective reality, just like any other instrument. You can't just handwave away bullshit by saying "it's a learnable skill", any more than a yogi who apparently levitates or a minister who apparently heals the blind can. I would assign a very low confidence to the assertion that your self-evaluation of the power of a low effect-size intervention using an undefined criterion holds any water at all, especially when the confidence interval you personally assigned it (ignoring the problems with that) dips below zero. I'm aware that I'm taking a somewhat combative tone here, but I really am worried of the consequences when useful rationalist skills and modes of thought are treated like all-purpose hammers - especially when the problem at hand is closer to a screw than a nail. That's how we got phrenology and Freudian psychodynamics - a useful, rational idea or tool that is used imprecisely or improperly to create a fortress of assertion with no foundation is falsifiable, testable reality. This isn't so bad as that - these assertions could be tested with some work. Until they have, though, please don't use the linguistic style of things that have a grounding in experiment to talk about them. It confuses things.