philosophy of science

[Commentary text above the quoted tweet, unclear author since header is scrolled off-screen] This passage from Yudkowsky addresses the main oversight in the way he's previously talked about bayesianism. Not sure if he's changed his mind or else is just making his views more explicit, but good to see either way. [Quoted tweet, screenshotted as an image within the tweet] "Very often in Science, especially when you're working in a confused 'pre-paradigmatic' field, 98% of the work is in coming up with the right hypothesis to test. That's often more important than the elaborate Law of Probability about how to interpret results that are less than totally clear. We study that part because it has clearer Law to study and it helps reshape our thoughts, not because it's the most important or difficult part of the problem." "And of that work of coming up with the right hypothesis to test, again, often the most difficult part is seeing the rule you were taking completely for granted - not a rule you explicitly believed, just a way you behaved automatically without being able to see that and so question it. As soon as you see the implicit rule, you can imagine it being false, but only once you see it." "The difficult thing, in most pre-paradigmatic and confused problems at the beginning of some Science, is not coming up with the right complicated long sentence in a language you already know. It's breaking out of the language in which every hypothesis you can write is false." 1:59 AM · Mar 26, 2022 [reply icon] 10 [retweet icon] 7 [heart icon] 126 [bookmark icon] 26 [share icon] Relevant ⌄ Eliezer Yudko... ✓ @ESYu... · Mar 26, 2022 Just making it explicit