Month: September 2020
Posted on September 30, 2020
The Scientific Method in Proficiology
In a sense, studying generic sentient beings is kind of like studying a fictional universe. There’s no obvious notion of accuracy or correctness – after all, a generic mind is not necessarily an accurate depiction of human psychology. The whole field seems kind of self-contained and any statement about the world of the generics frankly appears unfalsifiable, in the same way that theories about a fictional universe are impossible to disprove through experiment.
Why should we care about such fictional domains? When there are high stakes to explain or understand a phenomenon, we look toward science for answers. It is tempting to treat scientific concepts as concrete things that objectively exist, making scientific theories seem much more tightly grounded in reality than the aforementioned theories around fictional universes. But I argue that in many cases, the two are not all that different. Of course, I am not saying that scientific work is purely fictional. All bodies of science agree that statements must be tested against real-world observations in order to be taken seriously. However, there are many different ways to do scientific work, and by grouping these methods under a common name we are desensitizing ourselves to their differences. In pointing out these differences, I will show you how scientific theory can be more fantastical than we initially expect.
Updated on October 12, 2020
Agents – The Source of Motivation and Action
The last two posts1 were focused on the lens. They discussed its various modes of operation, the dichotomy between the outward-facing “causal estimate” and the inward-facing “evaluation”, and the problems of foreign context and overgeneralization.
But it’s important to note that the lens is, at heart, a statistical machine. It is only concerned with how accurately it can perform its tasks (casual prediction, event interpretation etc.), and does not intentionally distort itself to satisfy any agenda. In other words, the lens lacks agency and a hypothetical “lens-only” generic is only good for making uninterested predictions or classifications2.
To breathe more life into the generic mind I introduced the agent, a cognitive process with an inherent goal to cause the production of certain evaluations. The concept behind its operation is as follows:
- Use the lens to perform value prediction. In other words, given some known prior information and the desired evaluations, figure out what must be in the posterior information for the lens to produce such an evaluation.
- Try to engineer the actions and circumstances of the generic to increase the odds that the right events happen. If this is done successfully then the lens will produce the evaluations that the agent desires.
