A first lesson in meta-rationality

That comment is picking at a fair critique, but some details seem to be wrong.

> rationalists hope that if they take one map, and keep updating it long enough, this map will asymptotically approach the territory

That is, as far as can be detected, what the human brain does. It isn't just the rationalists who have a view and keep updating it, hoping it will asymptotically approach the territory. It is exceedingly difficult to have a strategy that doesn't do that and still be a semi-functional member of society.

I'm struggling to see how someone could hold 'different' maps because they become one map in your head. Rationalists are perfectly comfortable with there being multiple possible scenarios leading to an outcome.

My guess is that this observation is going to the fact that rationalists are very, very uncomfortable (to the point of falling apart, sometimes) in accepting "because I say so" as sufficient evidence to update a view, change behaviour stop arguing and be a good sport about the whole thing. Which is very much a social faux-pas when dealing with high status people and often a mistake when dealing with inarticulate people who are nevertheless correct in their view.

This was a good read and I really enjoyed it (I'm another person who was turned onto Bongard problems by Hofstadter), but two parts weren't particularly strong.

The first one was the dismissal of intuition in a way that seemed pretty straw man like to me: "Mostly, “intuition” just means “mental activity we don’t have a good explanation for,” or maybe “mental activity we don’t have conscious access to.” It is a useless concept, because we don’t have good explanation for much if any mental activity, nor conscious access to much of it. By these definitions, nearly everything is “intuition,” so it’s not a meaningful category."

I think the author could have spent longer trying to come up with a better definition of what someone would mean by intuition with relation to these problems instead of just setting up a poor one then immediately tearing it down. Intuition here would be contrasted against the deliberate procedural thinking of "let's list out qualities of these shapes" and would be something like seeing the solution straight away, but can also be combined with the procedural thinking too with the intuition originating possible useful avenues and then the deliberate part working through them. The contrast is that you could easily write down one set of the steps to be replicated by others (the deliberate part: "I counted the sides on all shapes") but less so the other (intuition: "I thought x", "x jumped out").

The second is that the example they use for mushiness really isn't. There is a perfectly concrete solution to that that doesn't involve any mushiness and is simply that the convex hull of one set is triangular while the others are circular. The only mushiness involved is that saying "triangles vs circles" feels like enough of answer to us to not need to specify any more. We think that we can continue with just this answer and be able to correctly identify any future instances so it seems mushy but you can probably think of examples that would confound the mushy solution but be fine under the more concrete convex hull one.

For the third I got:

triangle never in circle - circle never in triangle

compared to the given answer:

triangle bigger than circle - circle bigger than triangle

My solution is more general (worse), because it ignores size in non-containment arrangements, but also slightly more specific (better), because it constrains the single containment example in each set.

Neither of the rules say anything about overlapping cases, but there are no overlapping examples in the given sets. So there is a underlying constraint of no overlaps, but it applies to both sides, so it is not a distinguishing factor.

FYI, it is a synonym for the epistemology (philosophy of knowledge) called constructivism.

Yeah, as part of my free podcast audiobook version of Meaningness, I'm constantly asking him for updates, in order to provide a structure in which he'll work on one book at a time and completely finish it. So far it's working out pretty well.

https://fluidity.libsyn.com/