Getting stuck in local minima

post by louis030195 (louis-beaumont) · 2022-06-19T08:50:14.032Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

This is a link post for https://brain.louis030195.com/Philosophy/Epistemology/Getting+stuck+in+local+minima

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  The descent is steep
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I don't have a lot of occasion of discussing and challenging my ideas, it's hard sometimes, I try to explain what I read for example, but sometimes the conversation is not aligned.

When you don't expose your ideas, you take the risk of getting stuck in local minima, that is when your map does not reflect the territory, but you are unaware of it.

Exposing your ideas allows you, sometimes, to get out of this local minima (if you have Epistemic humility), i.e., to revise your map and understand that you were wrong.

For example, I used to think that in health looking at evolution was a pretty good heuristic, that is the diet of our ancestors should be quite healthy for us. Someone hinted to me that we don't have that much data about our ancestors and that our nature might have adapted to our new environment.

A good Epistemic hygiene to avoid these local minima is to get rid of your Ego, in a way, the ego makes the climb steeper.

The descent is steep

Say you start believing that the earth is flat, then you will stop believing in relativity, in our physics, etc. at some point it's too hard to escape the local minima.

(Karl Popper)

You'll end up building a map that does not reflect the territory.

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