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On Strong Inference,

Started by Kai, June 06, 2010, 12:46:55 AM

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Kai

Or

How to Increase Knowledge in Any Field.

This is both a rant and a literary/philosophical essay that I wrote while hyped on caffeine at the Dallas airport earlier today. So it goes here.

I've mentioned strong inference on several occassions, but always with reference to physical sciences. It was conceived by Plaitt in the 60s and 70s in both the Kuhnian sense of puzzle solvers and the Popperian sense of revolution. Upon reading EO Wilson's book Consilience, I am convinced that it can be applied to any field of knowledge, to the physical sciences, social sciences, and yes, even in art and humanities.

I've outlined it in parts before, but right now, sitting here in a Texan Airport, it is eating at my brain to get this on paper now, and my pen and paper are in my other bag. So be it. I type faster anyway.

1) Examine the universe for patterns. There are patterns everywhere. There are obvious patterns in science, but there are also patterns in art. The task is to look for these patterns, develop a keen eye/ear/other sense organ and seek them out. The more individuals (atoms to cultures) exibiting a pattern, the more likely it is to actually be meaningful. And by meaningful, I mean it has some sort of continuity, it's not a single isolated event.

2) Ask interesting questions. And by interesting questions, I mean ones that actually address patterns that are, or at least seem to be meaningful. It's also important to separate proximate and ultimate levels if necessary.

Proximate questions ask how, they address the mechanism, the direct reason for an event or happening, the causation. In physics, these are about the only questions you can ask.

Ultimate questions ask WHY, they address the continuity of the situation, otherwise known as the evolutionary reason for events. In physics, these questions end up in tautological answers, but in biology, social sciences and on up, these become very interesting questions.

In asking a question, one should strive to reduce and simplify it to a single statement. It might be something like "Why do bees not visit red flowers?" or "Why are serpents represented in art of many cultures?" Remember, these can be addressed at ultimate and proximate levels.

3) Develop multiple alternative hypotheses. These should address proximate and ultimate levels separatly, if needed. And like questions, they should be simple statements. The simpler the better, because a simple statement is easier to test than a complex statement, either in length or linguistics. The more alternatives, the better.

At the proximate level, the hypotheses should of course deal with mechanism. In biology, we usually work with cues, releasers, primers, etc. I'm sure you can devise mechanisms for your particular field.

At the ultimate level, hypotheses are dealing with biology on up, in an evolutionary context. As an example, in biology there are five basic reasons for everything ultimate-wise, if they are meaningful patterns.
a) Predators/parasites/pathogens
b) competition
c) fecundity
d) environment
f) nutrition

Again, the usefulness of these particular reasons may vary in different sciences. The goal is to find hypothese that address a continuity reason, a reason of, why is this pattern present instead of dissapeared? Why is this pattern around for more than a single event?

4) Devise a crutial experiment. The experiment should aim to eliminate, not support, at least one of your alternative hypotheses. By process of elimination, the hypothesis that fails to be rejected is the most robust.

Now, experiments in the physical sciences are often manipulative. You take a control and a treatment, replicate it several times and use the results to determine whether hypotheses are falsified.

Observational experiments, on the other hand, as used in the historical sciences, and in things where you can't actively control for variables, are based in congruence. Congruence is the ability of data to match other data. Higher and higher levels of congruence indicate a corroborated hypothesis. Incongruence indicates an uncorroborated hypothesis.

5) Use corroborated and unrejected hypotheses to generate further hypotheses. Return to step one to discover more patterns. Redspeat. Ad infinitum.


Now, some people may argue that you can't do this in art, in literature, and history and the rest of the humanities. I ask, are there not any patterns? Are you telling me there are no meaningful patterns in art, in literature, in philosophy? Are you saying that you can't ask questions of how and why about these patterns and determine alternative hypotheses? Are you telling me, that in the face of overwhelming congruent observational evidence for one hypothesis and incongruent evidence for other hypotheses you would not dive towards the congruent one as knowledge?

Please. Any one can use strong inference. It is a system primed and fitted for the unity of knowledge, and it will expand knowledge wherever it is applied.
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia Dissection
Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
Chanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

Juana

"I dispose of obsolete meat machines.  Not because I hate them (I do) and not because they deserve it (they do), but because they are in the way and those older ones don't meet emissions codes.  They emit too much.  You don't like them and I don't like them, so spare me the hysteria."

Jasper

Hell yeah.

I really really love it when smart people explain huge, great ideas in accessible writing.


Telarus

:mittens::mittens::mittens:

Art is an iterative process, like science, like learning. Great post.
Telarus, KSC,
.__.  Keeper of the Contradictory Cephalopod, Zenarchist Swordsman,
(0o)  Tender to the Edible Zen Garden, Ratcheting Metallic Sex Doll of The End Times,
/||\   Episkopos of the Amorphous Dreams Cabal

Join the Doll Underground! Experience the Phantasmagorical Safari!

ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞

#4
Really strong inference time!
 \
:banana:
  /
Really strong inference time!

I like it.
P E R   A S P E R A   A D   A S T R A

Kai

And in case you want to read the original paper that started the system: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/science64_strong_inference.pdf
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia Dissection
Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
Chanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

Placid Dingo

This is so fantastic. Will sneak it into a class.
Haven't paid rent since 2014 with ONE WEIRD TRICK.

LMNO

Post of the season.  If you don't mind, I'm gonna print it out and stick it on my wall.

Kai

Don't mind. Wish most humans actually took this shit seriously.
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia Dissection
Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
Chanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

nerinamakani

I infer that  actions based on a belief in the supernatural may be more effective than those of a materialist perspective in some (usually social) situations because of the effect that these beliefs have had in shaping the human conciousness. Thus making them..er...true?  :mrgreen:

*giggles*

chaos viewing prism lenses anyone? they are like funky beer goggles for reality, yes?
Warning: Definitions may become blurry as you enter the white light of mysticism.

Nephew Twiddleton

Don't want to spag this up, so feel free to PM-

Are bees wont to avoid red flowers? I am cripplingly melissophobic. It's bad.
Strange and Terrible Organ Laminator of Yesterday's Heavy Scene
Sentence or sentence fragment pending

Soy El Vaquero Peludo de Oro

TIM AM I, PRIMARY OF THE EXTRA-ATMOSPHERIC SIMIANS

Kai

Quote from: nerinamakani on June 08, 2010, 08:28:21 PM
I infer that  actions based on a belief in the supernatural may be more effective than those of a materialist perspective in some (usually social) situations because of the effect that these beliefs have had in shaping the human conciousness. Thus making them..er...true?  :mrgreen:

*giggles*

chaos viewing prism lenses anyone? they are like funky beer goggles for reality, yes?

I think you need to get off the pot.
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia Dissection
Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
Chanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

Kai

Quote from: Nephew Twiddleton on June 08, 2010, 08:36:53 PM
Don't want to spag this up, so feel free to PM-

Are bees wont to avoid red flowers? I am cripplingly melissophobic. It's bad.

At the proximate level, many bees don't visit red flowers because they literally can't see the color red.

At the ultimate level, many flowers turn red when they've run out of nectar, so evolutionarily it's a waste of time to visit red flowers. Cotton, for example.
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia Dissection
Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
Chanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

Brotep

@OP: Yes!

The learning process is largely the same regardless of the instantiation.  :)


Mind, sometimes we must contend with compound/multiple universes.


In music two factors create universes of possibility:

the design of the instrument
(those techniques and phrases that come most naturally, and more fundamentally that which is possible vs. that which is impossible)

and

musicianship in the abstract
(what you can imagine/create)


The design of the instrument pushes your technique toward that which comes most naturally, whereas your musicianship pushes your technique beyond that, toward the fundamental limits of what can be played given the instrument's construction.

Kai

Quote from: Brotep on June 09, 2010, 04:44:57 AM
@OP: Yes!

The learning process is largely the same regardless of the instantiation.  :)


Mind, sometimes we must contend with compound/multiple universes.


In music two factors create universes of possibility:

the design of the instrument
(those techniques and phrases that come most naturally, and more fundamentally that which is possible vs. that which is impossible)

and

musicianship in the abstract
(what you can imagine/create)


The design of the instrument pushes your technique toward that which comes most naturally, whereas your musicianship pushes your technique beyond that, toward the fundamental limits of what can be played given the instrument's construction.

We can still find patterns in that though. Think about instrument form, history of instrument design. We can track down the roots of different instruments and infer an instrument "phylogeny" based upon congruence of characters and historical information. We can, for example, track the modern acoustic guitar back to the torres classical and folk guitars of the 18th and 19th century, and further track those back to the vihuela. We can find a geneology of styles, "mutations" and novel creativity, etc.

Also, although music is abstract, there is a level of abstraction involved. We can, say, trace the idea of a melody, and how that broke down over time within North American music movements such as Jazz, where the level of abstraction from melody increased.

We can see these patterns, and we can ask these questions, regardless of the field. I think that's amazing, there really IS a unity of knowledge.
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia Dissection
Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
Chanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish