Rationality Exercise: My Little Pony

Ugh, you just HAD to make this a whole bunch of lesswrongers first impression of the show, didn't you? I've been tiptoing around mentioning it for ages planing to make a certain post abaut (still planing to, so I wont spoil it here), figures someone was going to do somehting like that.

Will you at least put up an disclaimer at the top of the post explaining how the show is great and actually one of the most rationality-inspiring shows out there with a brilliant fun-theory-compliant eutopia as the setting etc. etc.?

More on topic:

The question about the rationality of the believing in pinkie sense is actually even more interesting than it seems as first, here's somehting I wrote on another forum about it: "we here have an enormous amount of extremely strong and general evidence that excludes huge areas of hypothesis space. This is the STRONGLY DOMINANT reason you shouldn't believe certain kinds of things even if someone you trust sincerely tells you to. Things like "physical laws don't have exceptions, no exceptions", "there are no irreducibly mental (=supernatural) phenomena", "Due to huge flaws in the way human brains work, billions of people CAN be wrong, and frequently are. You can't even trust your own brain.". We have no reason to believe Equestria and ponykind have similar overriding principles. "

Or, in other words; most of the rationalist art that lesswrong is about does not necessarily translate to the ponyverse. It is specific to humans operating in a mathematical universe. If someone in OUR universe , their claim is extremely extraordinary for a bazilion reasons that evryone here knows all to well. However, in Equestria where magic is a very real phenomena used every day and somehting science is understanding a little better every day it's just a black swan. The apropriate reference class is not the same as someone here claiming to have a power that lets them predict the future by supernarural means, it's more akin to someone claiming to have a cognitive power that lets them predict what genre of music is on an LP by looking at it.

As for your actual question:

That somehting is happening does seem pretty clear. So is the fact that it's happening in her brain even if it's in a place not accessible to conciousness directly, that's how many kinds of intuition works for most humans at least, read up on embodied cognition if you're interested in this stuff. I'd focus on distinguishing between these two hypothesis: 1) information about PPs future cognition are sent back in time. In this scenario seeing a door slam up CAUSES her tail to twitch in the past. 2) She constantly have some ambiant magical sense that can see things outside the range of her normal senses. In this scenario she senses someone walking up to the door/their intention to open the door and subconsciously infers that the door is probably going to open, and her body reacts to this subconscious expectation.

"my _little _pony" is now a LessWrong tag.

Also, a bunch of LW people have been ponified in this amazing thread.

Leonhart:

I never used to have ponies in my utility function. And now it's 2AM.

[Note: I have not watched this show, but I have a horrible feeling I'm going to]

The first step would be to carry out a preliminary study to properly identify the nature of Pinky Pie's claim, and make sure it's not trivially explainable. If the claim is that her tail twitches whenever anything in the world is dropped, and Pinky Pie has early-onset Parkinson's Disease, we can all go home early.

We should compile all anecdotal accounts of Pinky Pie's precognitive tail twitches. Given the prevalence of falling objects in the world, there is presumably some limiting factor and factors distinguishing falling objects she can predict and falling objects she can't. I would hypothesise the two most important factors are mass and distance.

We would need to then devise a mechanism for recording the time, and if possible the geolocation, of every tail twitch Pinky Pie experiences. It would also be useful to ascertain whether the tail twitch is a binary state or if there are different magnitudes of twitch. A good initial experiment would be to introduce Pinky Pie to a) an environment with lots of falling objects, and b) an environment where there are no objects to fall, using her natural habitat as a control environment, to see if the frequency of her tail twitches corresponds with what I will term "ambient fallyness".

Assuming this establishes the veracity of her claim, we would need to establish a more precise description of the trigger event in order to determine the nature of the phenomenon, as well as in order to reliably reproduce it in experimental circumstances. Will objects induced to fall artificially still trigger the tail twitch, or does it exclusively happen with "natural" falling objects? The latter strikes me as a less likely trigger for an acausal physiological response in a talking pony, simply because it relies on the ability to determine volition, whereas the former could have a straightforward mechanical anticause.

Working on the assumption that artificial falls can trigger the twitch, once we've arrived at this juncture, it becomes important to distinguish whether or not the trigger is the subjectively observed event of an object falling or the mechanical event of an object being accelerated by gravity. To this extent, Pinky Pie must be made to observe objects in her own inertial frame of reference while subject to a parabolic flight path, while in free fall, and while having achieved terminal velocity.

I hope she likes heights.

Thinking 'in universe' the obvious test would be to have a pegasus fly above her unobserved with objects and drop them, with another compatriot on the ground observing the timing of her various twitches. Having done this one could vary the situation to rule out various causes, for example telling the pegasus to drop it at a certain time, or at a random time, to see if the precognition is genuine reverse causation or extremely accurate subconscious predicition (unlikely, but they are magical so it is semi plausible).

Assuming genuine reverse causation was possible, one might be able to send messages back in time. For example if this coin lands heads I will drop the object. Though this may lead to paradoxes if the message arrives before the event causing it, and somehow changes the situation such that the causing event doesn't hapen.

Link

I don't think the phenomenon as described admits of deliberately causing Pinkie's tail to twitch. The idea is that when her tail twitches, something is about to fall, not when something is about to fall, her tail twitches.

I'm rather impressed that MLP has pervaded practically every other form of social media. Truly an impressive meme. Anyway, I gathered that Twilight's first fallacy was reverse causation. Pinkie sense does not make something happen, something makes Pinkie sense happen. But, in a universe where Magic A is Magic A, maybe Pinkie Pie does influence the probability of an action. Time for the Schrodinger's Pony experiments!

Yeah, I basically see this episode as anti-science propaganda.
The "friendship lesson" basically says "make-belief is a good thing and should be respected".
Either that, or accepting the "supernatural" as such without further inquiry. Because it's by definition beyond the realm of science, duh.

(Whether it's intentional anti-science-propaganda is another question)