How to feel shocked enough?

How to feel shocked enough?

*Hindsight devalues science, but if it was just that we don't feel as "grateful" to science as we could, that would be a minor problem. Hindsight bias prevents us from noticing that the new scientific finding DOES NOT fit what we would have expected, and so we cannot debug why our world-model would have guessed differently.

This debugging is desirable, but pause here for a digression. Assume now that our priors were at actually 1:1 or better in favour of observing the finding. Even then (or maybe especially then), we're never as shocked as we could be (hindsight devalues science: "of course students perform better after a morning walk, all these researchers proving what we already knew, what a waste of dollars…"). Being simply told a fact, we need to put in conscious effort to be shocked enough.

It would be better if everyone always led with a question to let you guess first which way the fact will go, and only then gave you the fact (Ask people to guess before telling them a fact).

My idea to feel shocked enough: REVERSE ALL NEW FACTS.

(Looks like yet another type of Reversal test!)

It goes something like this… you reverse it and ask if you would've bought this with the same credulity, or if it would've been surprising. If surprising, that's good.

Sometimes there is no direct reverse as there were many possible answers. But you go back and ask what you would've guessed. (Maybe that's the proper name of the technique, not reversing the fact, but "what would've you guessed?")

It's really hard to know what you would've guessed, and that's why it's so much better to make a guess before hearing the fact.

Apply the technique to new science "findings" as a training step only – findings are easy to be skeptical of, thus not important. Where you most need your art as a rationalist is where it's most difficult. The goal is to reverse things that never occur to you as targets of doubt.

It takes effort to disbelieve, so probably good to have the habit of trying to disprove what you hear, and that starts with checking what you would've guessed. At least, when people tell you something new, you can ask "is that so?" to promote to consciousness the fact that you just heard and therefore believed something. Similar to the TAP action "I notice that I'm confused", but here the function to you is simply "I notice that I just received unverified data".

For bonus points, say "Is that so? I wouldn't have guessed that" or "Is that so? I would've guessed X instead."

I'd like to run this mental operation often so it's effortless. It actually creates interesting daydreams too: when a coworker says his car broke down, you stop and wonder: "huh. I wonder if I could've expected that" and start looking back for signs. Productive daydreams that refine your world-model.

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Created (2 years ago)