Taking a personal break from COVID-fever, and made myself write up a thought experiment I’ve bounced around in my head. Having a good theory is more useful to humanity than your intuitions. If you get 99 predictions right, and then number 100 is a completely novel thing that contradicts what you believe, it means that you had good intuitions regarding your experiences, but your theory doesn’t work well outside of that range. It’s what happens when you put it up against novel situations. I believe this will make it betterĪt the end of the day, it’s not the number of right predictions that will uphold your theory. Observe more empirical facts and you’ll see immediate tension with your ideas.
Observe a few empirical facts, then come up with a theory to explain it. Instead, what you should do is theorize early and often. That’s the wrong approach because even though you have good intuitions, it’s easy to come up with a wrong theory that has little chance of being proven wrong. Some people suggest that you should observe a bunch of facts and only then, come up with a theory that tries to explain it all. Again, their understanding is improving, and their theories might even have strong predictive power, but their theory could still be completely wrong.
And when something happens that seems to be in tension with the theory, they just add new rules their theory to help explain it.
Two people can have similar experiences and have the same intuitions, but with different theories explaining it, even though these explanations may at best only partially explain something, contradict each other, or even be nonsensical. If you’re an introspective person, you explicitly try to connect these outcomes with a causal understanding. Anytime you have a lot of experience with something, you notice patterns and are able to anticipate certain outcomes.
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