Key lime pie and the methods of rationality

In a recent comment, I approvingly cited a pair of cookbooks (Christopher Kimball’s Cook’s Bible and Dessert Bible), and said that—

For anyone who likes to cook or wants to learn, I think these two cookbooks can advance your grasp, not only of cooking, but of rationality as well.

This might’ve seemed to some folks to be a strange thing to say; what has cooking (or baking) to do with rationality (any more than any other activity)? In answer to that potential question, here’s a list of some of the rationality-related concepts that appear in this post (in addition to the central concept—the question of public epistemology—which the post is explicitly about):

• The necessity of domain knowledge (a.k.a. “expert knowledge” or “background knowledge”) for reasoning about some domain or topic
• The difficulty of converting qualitative information into quantitative information
• The indispensability of learning by doing vs. the benefit of transmissible instruction
• Chesterton’s fences, and when it is ok to knock them down
• Different types of optimality criteria

Are there others I missed?

Update: one of the readers of my blog has posted this excellent response post of his own, in which he explores the “experiment with variations” part of the SDI method I described. He writes:

My purpose here is to show you that:

• Varying a procedure will improve your skill at performing that procedure.
• Varying a procedure will teach you things about a problem domain. In fact, you’ll learn more about a problem domain if you change things around than if you repeatedly do a procedure the same way.
• Procedure variations will teach you about a problem domain even if your variations are accidental and/or detrimental.
• Even if your procedure-execution abilities are flawed, you can still oftentimes turn out a good, if suboptimal, product.

I recommend reading his post in its entirety; it’s a great case study of improving one’s procedural knowledge / skills through iteration, and showcases the engaging and rewarding qualities of cooking that I discussed in a previous comment.

Update: I’ve added an infographic to the recipe writeup, which summarizes the process in a nice visual way (inspired by this John Baez post; h/t gwern):

(TL;DR: good post OP)

I liked this post, and it seems to formalize my existing food-related intuitions reasonably well as well as suggesting useful new methods. Also, it has prompted me to subscribe to the author's blog's RSS feed.

Meta note: I wanted to cross-post the entirety of this post here, rather than just making it a link post. Unfortunately, it turned out that doing so would be a massive amount of work—I’d have to do a whole lot of manual conversion of the markup, etc.—and many features of the original post would be simply impossible to convert (the slide galleries, the click-to-enlarge-images feature, the footnotes and backreferences, the nicely-formatted table, etc.).

I would love to see LW2 (or, as I guess I should now say, simply ‘LW’) somehow solve this issue. (I have some ideas for how this might be approached, but none of them are simple, alas…) It seems to me that encouraging cross-posting is a desirable goal.

Promoted to the frontpage.