A better term for the hyperrationalism I’ve been talking about would be…well, hyperrationalism, but even better: Platonicity.  Plato said it is irrational that we prefer the use of one hand over another.  Of course it’s “rational” in terms of the universe we’re in (which exhibits ‘handedness’ in chemistry) and how our brains evolved (to be asymmetric for a reason).  I may return to this in more detail.  Taleb defines Platonicity as “the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.”  (He doesn’t ever note the irony involved in Platonicity, which postures as being as rational as possible but it’s actually grounded in focusing on the “easily discernible” over the messiness of life as it actually exists 99% of the time.)

Taleb’s book failure is the failure to follow through on what he presents.  He effectively trashes much of academia (though he fails to show the limits of the more directly empirical sciences like physics, where Platonicity manifests more indirectly).  He shows how easily our theories and stories about the world are trash.  Most scarily, he doesn’t just show that for predictions of the future, but our understanding of the past.

In the end though, his answer really boils down to “learn the biases [common errors] and heuristics [shortcuts that create holes] in your cognition and develop practices to avoid them” and he gives some examples, like not giving your money to a mutual fund manager.

But what would he replace the academy with?  What research programs would he devise?  What theories of the world (other than the theory that we have certain tendencies toward certain errors) would he construct and with what method?

He has shown that understanding the past and predicting the future are even harder than most of us realized, and he has even perhaps narrowed the limits of what we could predict and understand even if “perfect.”  However, by identifying the mechanisms that distort our understanding, he has made it possible to be more precise in our theories and models of the past and future.  While what we can predict may be more limited than thought before, using his tools, it can be strengthened.

But he shies away from grasping at the reigns of history.  Wimp!

One thing he taught me about theory building relates to the search for mechanisms.  

A Platonist would reject something whose mechanisms seem impossible according to his theories.  At least an average skeptical empiricist may accept something that seems to work yet conflicts with his models of the world but would also not attempt to figure out why that is (or Taleb seems not to).

Take homeopathy.  The mechanism by which it claims to work (diluting a substance with water so much that it’s impossible that any significant amount of the substance is left in the ‘medicine’, taking which is supposed to help the person) is scientifically impossible.  However, there is some evidence that it “has an effect over a placebo.”  The harder the investigation, the less evidence.

Now turn to antidepressants.  The mechanisms by which they claim to work are scientifically plausible, but only plausible.  They’re actually little understood and disputed.  And a recent review of the studies as to effectiveness show that in a majority of studies for most patients the difference from placebo was minimal (and it should be noted that homeopathy has no direct side effects, whereas antidepressants have many, including suicidal urges).

A skeptical empiricist could say the “superstition” of someone following homeopathy would’ve protected him from the rational idiocy of something like antidepressants.

But I want to propose a mechanism they have in common: the relationship of the client and healer.  I propose that it’s that relationship that produced the positive effects (including from the placebo, especially in the depression studies: not the belief per se that the pill was making them better, but the hope that someone was caring for them).

Now, the empiricist says, “Where’s your data?”  I would point to the qualitative but indirect data of how humans evolved in close-knit communities, how babies can die if given their “physical” needs but are not held, etc.

I think a better approximation is (from the overcoming bias blog): “How does this constrain your expectation?”  In other words, if a statement can equally explain or not explain something, it’s nonsense.  How would the world be different if my proposition is wrong?  One could then design experiments based around my supposition.  I think Taleb’s method fails to show how to get to this point.  How to develop a theory in a way that is aware of the common errors and takes steps to prevent them: a back and forth between empirical (concrete) and theory (abstract).

How does one decide what medicines to take?

The skeptical empiricist will outlive the Platonist.  But the anti-Platonist theorist will save both their lives.

But what that means could be developed more.  Saying a balance or back and forth between concrete and abstract is not enough.  A big step is 1) taking into account the anti-biases of Taleb and 2) passionately striving for the grand theories, for taking up the reigns of history, anyways.  Something like that…perhaps.

To return to domain-specific knowledge needed for life mastery.  Definitive sources would be very helpful.  While I’m confident of my nutrition knowledge, it is continually refined and with supplements, I’m not sure (other than omega 3 from fish or krill is needed, and vitamin d if not enough sun).

The real key to life mastery is what the post doesn’t address: what do you want out of life?  

Now, that doesn’t mean I believe every answer to that question will lead to anything like what I would call “mastery” (a poor word choice in some ways).  But the real key is passion.

Passion can make the joints and breath feel better without conscious practice and can overcome the effects of what it doesn’t make feel better.  But not all passions are equal and not all are sustainable.  I think there’s more than one answer to the question of what passions will lead to a full life, but it’s partly subjective in terms of mastery: do you feel mastery in your life if you do X?  People can both answer that question the same but get different results in terms of what an onlooker would call “mastery.”

So what is “solved” about life mastery is the question: What is a reproducible way to execute a well defined, conscious practice to influence one’s life in the direction of having the most resources available to contribute to life and meet its various challenges?  Passion/hope/relationships/luck/etc. can replace this conscious practice, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently, but they can not do so in a way that is reproducible in another person.

The core of the daily personal practice to achieve life mastery is creating mobility: exhaling through stress and effort, moving the joints and muscles to transform the fascia and posture, learning to reintegrate breath, movement and structure in the face of strain to them and developing resiliency to strain.  This is found in the work of Scott Sonnon’s system of Circular Strength Training.

One can master “CST” and not master life (but if one has mastered CST and is passionately and diligently trying to master life and failing, I can’t imagine another path to mastery that would’ve worked for that person).  One can master life and not “CST” or something like it (but that person would either benefit from CST or has unconsciously reproduced it in subtle ways–normally I would bet on a mix).

How to master/practice life?
Passionately.

What well-definable, reproducible daily personal practice best trains the bodymind to nurture, house, express, grow that passion?
Circular Strength Training.

The last point ended with an urge to seize upon every flicker of doubt.  Not only is seizing upon doubt and tracking it down not contrary to contrasting a theory of the world and its parts and having theoretical principles that one is intellectually conservative about, the two tasks are partners.  

Tracking the thread of doubt (and even purposely exposing one’s self to possibilities of doubt by reading outside one’s field, eavesdropping, studying random things–since one cannot know where doubt could come from) is a way to keep your theory “honest”, but a theory of the world–if it’s worthwhile–will help you find doubt.

Taleb in his book The Black Swan gives the example of a turkey being fed every day.  If you plot that and the turkey’s “confidence” that it’ll be fed the next day, it’s impossible to extrapolate from that data that one day before Thanksgiving, that turkey will be killed instead of fed.  One predict that with the “data” that turkeys in certain contexts are being fed to be killed.  If one simply “doubted” the latter data, one would be just as confused as naively extrapolating from the first set of data.  One can learn to doubt data sets of the first kind, even if one doesn’t know what the more necessary data is. Theory guides and clarifies doubt which clarifies and guides theory.

Not through an extraordinary spiritual gift, not through momentary inspiration, unexpected and unique, but through constant work did I eventually achieve such satisfactory results.–Goethe

And I don’t mean reading.

The question stems from the conceited sounding question: How did I get so far in so many fields?

I started thinking about method, but then when I asked “What method led to that method?” I realized I had committed the rationalist error of focusing too narrowly on the conceptual, which cannot be first.  I got far from passion, passion that began to reflect on itself.

(This doesn’t address what made my development different than others with passion.  Two things: 1) not becoming overspecialized/discipline-bound/career-bound and 2) finding a renewable energy source for my passion: not just a worthy goal, but a goal that gives reason to “speed” in knowledge.  As well as this post.)

I guess this isn’t really about “method” overall, because method is a piece of an overall theory or worldview, which I’m not presenting here.  It’s more about techniques.

One technique is modeling.  It’s something I often did though I got the use as a research term from NLP.  If someone’s doing something you want to do, model them (intellectually this often boils down to: read everything they wrote.)

One of my favorites is triangulating different positions.  Research the different positions on an issue (especially minority ones) and try to find a view that can account for all of them.  A key part of this and my other favorite technique is to look for disagreement (or do a broad search).  One has to develop heuristics (rules for processing) to speed this along, which one can do through experience (partially necessary) and through researching the fields of cognitive biases and probability theory specifically for general heuristics, but there are domain-specific heuristics (or perhaps they’re only applications or combinations of the other ones, but one gets better at detecting how they manifest in certain domain-specific ways.)  For instance, in the field of medicine and nutrition I see two common biases: one: medical researchers are idiotic (narrowly focused as in idiom in a dumb way).  They’re so overly specialized in specific fields of biology they often don’t know the research in other ones, much less understand “reasoning” in general.  (The flip-side of this is that your doctor doesn’t know even that research!)  Two: the focus on discovering something one can mass produce to sell exercises a heavy hand over the whole research process.  The “alternative” medicine people have their own specific trends of biases one can start to detect as well of course.

Another technique is to understand the source of disagreement.  What is the basis for the disagreement?  How could it arise?  How could it continue?  While it is easy to fall into the trap of explaining away what you disagree with yourself, if you can account for why others disagree with your view, then you can be even more confident of it.

Look for those tiny bits of evidence that cause a flicker of doubt.  (There’s a cognitive bias/default to use our reason to find evidence to support our first guesses.)  In some ways, this derives from all the above techniques, and in other ways, is perhaps the most important.  It is very easy to get trapped in a black hole of a particular worldview or discipline or whatever, a black hole made not of gravity but of self-confirming ideas.  Academic scenes and specialties are little different than subcultures like goths–the main difference is that academics are more hypocritical.  ”Agreeing to disagree” when it comes to knowledge is mainly to either agree that the other person’s a fool or that your evidence isn’t that good.  At best, it’s agreeing that there isn’t good evidence either way–or you don’t understand it, which means not that you should agree to disagree because why have an opinion without good evidence?  How does one avoid these traps?  Traps that essentially the whole intellectual elite is caught in?  On the level of technique, perhaps looking for that flicker of doubt and seizing on it.  But technique can only take you so far.

This Overcoming Bias post and its prereq post reading should allow one to derive how the above is an extension of Bayesian reasoning for a more rigorous exposition of these techniques.