3 ms·

Measurement is great. I'm all for it. But there's a serious problem with scientism in the modern world. I think it's great to develop a way of looking at the w

Measurement is great. I'm all for it. But there's a serious problem with scientism in the modern world. I think it's great to develop a way of looking at the world that 'takes people out' - we can predict the motion of the moon without regard to what people think or feel about how the moon will move. The moon's motion does not take our feelings into account. It starts to get really silly, though, when you try to use those same techniques to look at people. "How do people behave, in the absense of people" is a very silly question to ask, but it seems like that's what we try to do when we look at people through the lens of modern scientific methods. Every person is different and has a different personal history. The idea that you can formulate some 'general rule' for how people behave is as baseless as trying to come up with a 'general rule' for computers. It makes much more sense to look at different software patterns and how they operate, rather than trying to snip a transistor and then see how the graphical output changes, which is effectively what we do in mental health medicine.

kordless 10y ago
The problem you are referring to is known, although I'm not sure how widely spread. You can't measure the measurer, so there's a gap in our perception. There's a RI talk on this, where the color purple is discussed. There's really no color purple, for example. It's your eye picking up the absence of green when seeing blue and red light together. In other words, perhaps purple is a program in your head. Perhaps our ability to understand the nature of a measurement is an absence of something we yet to integrate into our knowledge base? My vote is for a momentary access to the global consciousness. Like an API with a "search" timer on it. It serves efficient queries faster. It does this in a fixed timeframe using a hierarchical form of evaluation. It knows everything it knows so far. In other words, perhaps causality in this reality is based on some type of immutable programmable storage. Perhaps that' why it's hard to change things here too.

kordless 10y ago

The problem you are referring to is known, although I'm not sure how widely spread. You can't measure the measurer, so there's a gap in our perception. There's a RI talk on this, where the color purple is discussed. There's really no color purple, for example. It's your eye picking up the absence of green when seeing blue and red light together. In other words, perhaps purple is a program in your head. Perhaps our ability to understand the nature of a measurement is an absence of something we yet to integrate into our knowledge base? My vote is for a momentary access to the global consciousness. Like an API with a "search" timer on it. It serves efficient queries faster. It does this in a fixed timeframe using a hierarchical form of evaluation. It knows everything it knows so far. In other words, perhaps causality in this reality is based on some type of immutable programmable storage. Perhaps that' why it's hard to change things here too.