The Nonlinear Library LW - My Model of Epistemology by adamShimi
Sep 1, 2024
15:12
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My Model of Epistemology, published by adamShimi on September 1, 2024 on LessWrong.
I regularly get asked by friends and colleagues for recommendation of good resources to study epistemology. And whenever that happens, I make an internal (or external) "Eeehhh"pained sound.
For I can definitely point to books and papers and blog posts that inspired me, excited me, and shaped my world view on the topic. But there is no single resource that encapsulate my full model of this topic.
To be clear, I have tried to write that resource - my hard-drive is littered with such attempts. It's just that I always end up shelving them, because I don't have enough time, because I'm not sure exactly how to make it legible, because I haven't ironed out everything.
Well, the point of this new blog was to lower the activation energy of blog post writing, by simply sharing what I found exciting quickly. So let's try the simplest possible account I can make of my model.
And keep in mind that this is indeed a work in progress.
The Roots of Epistemology
My model of epistemology stems from two obvious facts:
The world is complex
Humans are not that smart
Taken together, these two facts mean that humans have no hope of ever tackling most problems in the world in the naive way - that is, by just simulating everything about them, in the fully reductionist ideal.
And yet human civilization has figured out how to reliably cook tasty meals, build bridges, predict the minutest behaviors of matter... So what gives?
The trick is that we shortcut these intractable computations: we exploit epistemic regularities in the world, additional structure which means that we don't need to do all the computation.[1]
As a concrete example, think about what you need to keep in mind when cooking relatively simple meals (not the most advanced of chef's meals).
You can approximate many tastes through a basic palette (sour, bitter, sweet, salty, umami), and then consider the specific touches (lemon juice vs vinegar for example, and which vinegar, changes the color of sourness you get)
You don't need to model your ingredient at the microscopic level, most of the transformations that happen are readily visible and understandable at the macro level: cutting, mixing, heating…
You don't need to consider all the possible combinations of ingredients and spices; if you know how to cook, you probably know many basic combinations of ingredients and/or spices that you can then pimp or adapt for different dishes.
All of these are epistemic regularities that we exploit when cooking.
Similarly, when we do physics, when we build things, when we create art, insofar as we can reliably succeed, we are exploiting such regularities.
If I had to summarize my view of epistemology in one sentence, it would be: The art and science of finding, creating, and exploiting epistemic regularities in the world to reliably solve practical problems.
The Goals of Epistemology
If you have ever read anything about the academic topic called "Epistemology, you might have noticed something lacking from my previous account: I didn't focus on knowledge or understanding.
This is because I take a highly practical view of epistemology: epistemology for me teaches us how to act in the world, how to intervene, how to make things.
While doing, we might end up needing some knowledge, or needing to understand various divisions in knowledge, types of models, and things like that. But the practical application is always the end.
(This is also why I am completely uninterested in
the whole realism debate: whether most hidden entities truly exist or not is a fake question that doesn't really teach me anything, and probably cannot be answered. The kind of realism I'm interested in is the realism of usage, where there's a regularity (or lack thereof) which can be exploited in ...
I regularly get asked by friends and colleagues for recommendation of good resources to study epistemology. And whenever that happens, I make an internal (or external) "Eeehhh"pained sound.
For I can definitely point to books and papers and blog posts that inspired me, excited me, and shaped my world view on the topic. But there is no single resource that encapsulate my full model of this topic.
To be clear, I have tried to write that resource - my hard-drive is littered with such attempts. It's just that I always end up shelving them, because I don't have enough time, because I'm not sure exactly how to make it legible, because I haven't ironed out everything.
Well, the point of this new blog was to lower the activation energy of blog post writing, by simply sharing what I found exciting quickly. So let's try the simplest possible account I can make of my model.
And keep in mind that this is indeed a work in progress.
The Roots of Epistemology
My model of epistemology stems from two obvious facts:
The world is complex
Humans are not that smart
Taken together, these two facts mean that humans have no hope of ever tackling most problems in the world in the naive way - that is, by just simulating everything about them, in the fully reductionist ideal.
And yet human civilization has figured out how to reliably cook tasty meals, build bridges, predict the minutest behaviors of matter... So what gives?
The trick is that we shortcut these intractable computations: we exploit epistemic regularities in the world, additional structure which means that we don't need to do all the computation.[1]
As a concrete example, think about what you need to keep in mind when cooking relatively simple meals (not the most advanced of chef's meals).
You can approximate many tastes through a basic palette (sour, bitter, sweet, salty, umami), and then consider the specific touches (lemon juice vs vinegar for example, and which vinegar, changes the color of sourness you get)
You don't need to model your ingredient at the microscopic level, most of the transformations that happen are readily visible and understandable at the macro level: cutting, mixing, heating…
You don't need to consider all the possible combinations of ingredients and spices; if you know how to cook, you probably know many basic combinations of ingredients and/or spices that you can then pimp or adapt for different dishes.
All of these are epistemic regularities that we exploit when cooking.
Similarly, when we do physics, when we build things, when we create art, insofar as we can reliably succeed, we are exploiting such regularities.
If I had to summarize my view of epistemology in one sentence, it would be: The art and science of finding, creating, and exploiting epistemic regularities in the world to reliably solve practical problems.
The Goals of Epistemology
If you have ever read anything about the academic topic called "Epistemology, you might have noticed something lacking from my previous account: I didn't focus on knowledge or understanding.
This is because I take a highly practical view of epistemology: epistemology for me teaches us how to act in the world, how to intervene, how to make things.
While doing, we might end up needing some knowledge, or needing to understand various divisions in knowledge, types of models, and things like that. But the practical application is always the end.
(This is also why I am completely uninterested in
the whole realism debate: whether most hidden entities truly exist or not is a fake question that doesn't really teach me anything, and probably cannot be answered. The kind of realism I'm interested in is the realism of usage, where there's a regularity (or lack thereof) which can be exploited in ...