Anomalous Presumptions

I’ve been posting long enough, and have enough reaction from others (mainly in the form of visits, links and posts on other blogs) that I can observe some patterns in how this all plays out.

My posts cluster roughly around three main themes (in retrospect, not by design):

• Economic thinking, informed more by stochastic game theory than Arrow-Debreu style models
• The social impact of exponential increases in computer power, especially coupled with statistical modeling
• Philosophical analysis of emergence, supervenience, downward causation, population thinking, etc.

These seem to be interesting to readers roughly in that order, in (as best I can tell) a power-law like pattern — that is, I get several times as many visitors looking at my economic posts than my singularity / statistical modeling posts, and almost no one looking for my philosophical analysis (though the early Turner post has gotten some continuing attention).

I find the economics posts the easiest — I just “write what I see”. The statistical modeling stuff is somewhat more work, since I typically have to investigate technical issues in more depth than I would otherwise. Philosophical analysis much harder to write, and I’m typically less satisfied with it when I’m done.

The mildly frustrating thing about this is that I think the philosophical analysis is where I get most of my ability to provide value. My thinking about economics, for example, is mainly guided by my philosophical thinking, and I wouldn’t be able to see what I see without an arduously worked out set of conceptual habits and frameworks. I’d enjoy the kind of encouragement and useful additional perspectives I get from seeing people react to the other topics.

Reflecting on this a bit, I think mostly what I’m doing with the philosophical work is gradually prying loose a set of deeply rooted cognitive illusions — illusions that I’m pretty sure arise from the way consciousness works in the human brain. Early on, I wrote a couple of posts that touch on this theme — and in keeping with the pattern described above, they were hard to write, didn’t seem to get a lot of interested readers, and I found them useful conceptual steps forward.

“Prying loose illusions” is actually not a good way to describe what needs to be done. We wouldn’t want to describe Copernicus’ work as “prying loose the geocentric illusion”. If he just tried to do that it wouldn’t have worked. Instead, I’m building up ways of thinking that I can substitute for these cognitive illusions (partially, with setbacks). This is largely a job of cognitive engineering — finding ways of thinking that stick as habits, that become natural, that I can use to generate descriptions of stuff in the world (such as economic behavior) which others find useful, etc.

In my (ever so humble) opinion this is actually the most useful task philosophers could be doing, although unfortunately as far as I can tell they mostly don’t see it an important goal, and I suspect in many cases would say it is “not really philosophy”. To see if I’m being grossly unfair to philosophers, I just googled for “goals of x” for various disciplines (philosophy, physics, sociology, economics, …). The results are interesting and I think indicate I’m right (or at least not unfair), but I think I’ll save further thoughts for a post about this issue. If you’re curious feel free to try this at home.

Filed by Jed at 4:49 pm under Agenda, Mind, Philosophy
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