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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4377 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Anyone else feel like they are addicted to grand theories of everything? Anytime I get two minutes to myself to sit down and think I can't help but have my mind wander in the direction of psychohistorian style bullshit. Grand theories explaining the arc of history, of wokeness, or of financial booms and busts. Its all so enticing to me, but I'm pretty sure most of it is just a bullshit feeling that my mind spins up.

Newton was 'addicted' to grand theories, too! "Of an estimated ten million words of writing in Newton's papers, about one million deal with alchemy". Also a religious heretic, believing all sorts of random christian things.

Grand theories are fine, if they're true. If they're not, the problem isn't that they're "grand theoriesl", just that they're untrue. Read some science, history (although the former - physics, chem, bio, etc - is more uniformly reliable than the second), speak to/read from all sorts of people, and come up with the useful ones!

If they're not, the problem isn't that they're "grand theoriesl", just that they're untrue.

Yeah, but I think that's the problem - grand theories usually have a ton of exceptions, enough that using them in grand fashion will give you quite a few answers. In Tetlock's work on superforecasters, he found foxes beating hedgehogs (one summary here - https://www.themotte.org/post/1/smallscale-question-sunday-for-september-04/587?context=8#context). The grander the theory, the more likely that it's got flaws that will result in poor object-level predictions.

Is there any reason why one is called the fox and the other the hedgehog?

I have absolutely no idea. Good question.

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