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Steve Witham's avatar

Well besides idea futures and instruments, or whatever current financial practices might have similar effects...

"Spreadsheets" for idea sets and conflicting sets of idea sets. Sharable, with versioning and visualization. Discussion systems so one is putting commentary on proposed modifications, or pinning-downs, or ramifications, of assumptions or changes to them, and having conversation threads about individual change/exploration attempts.

In math you start with arithmetic, which works with constants, and then go to algebra, with variables, and calculus, with processes of change, and processes determined by constraints on changes.

Spreadsheets oddly straddle arithmetic and algebra: what you see on the surface is constants, but you can change the input constants and see concrete ramifications even if just hypothetical. Playing like that is something that seems to be helpful to humans anyway.

Logic and probability sort of start on the arithmetic-algebra-calculus route for ideas. What would help is more multiple-human-interfaced systems for that. In the sense that, e.g., Facebook supports a whole culture and set of human practices, not just a shared database of posts.

If you look at politics, journalism, and ideology-sports in general, we already have entrenched systems that may have (semi-false) entrenched meta-rationales (govt by the people, marketplace of ideas, balance of powers, etc.), but are absolutely known to be incoherent and contradictory, formed by wars and compromises on the base policy-creation/modification level. In these systems we develop lore about all the failure modes and all the patching and kludging and reform, refactoring and reconciliation attempt styles. E.g. in the newspaper my roommate reads, "pork" is a common word in headlines.

Having and using meta-expertise about the messed-upness of systems may serve to allow problems to survive longer, but it also has something to do with treating idea-sets as semi-fluid and managing changes to them.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"I can clearly feel my own reluctance to consider theories wherein the world is not as it appears, because we are being fooled by gods, simulation sysops, aliens, or a vast world elite conspiracy. Sometimes this is because those assumptions seem quite unlikely, but in other cases it is because I can see how much I’d have to rethink given such assumptions."

I think another reason to a priori mark these 'conscious-agents-did-it' explanations downwards is because they tend to be tweakable to adapt to a wide range of possible observations - so the theory schemas they represent are, almost by construction, very hard to falsify.

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