I think my answer is: spend thousands of hours reading papers, trying to sort wheat from chaff and learn as much as you can. At the end, you'll do it very quickly, mostly unconsciously. This isn't very helpful at a process level.
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @reasonisfun
When I was a grad student I did a bunch of grad-level course work in molbio. The bio dept had a famous course on how to read a scientific paper and figure out whether to believe it. I tried to take it but they wouldn’t let me; it was for ingroup only.
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They swore students to secrecy. I wonder if the contents have leaked since… Anyway, I’ve been thinking ever since about how to teach that for other fields
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Replying to @Meaningness @reasonisfun
I suspect the most important bits can't be reduced to process. You need to do it slowly and carefully a whole bunch of times, and all of a sudden you find yourself glancing at an abstract (or even a title) and going "That's BS", and pointing out likely failure modes...
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It worries me a lot that I mostly developed this filter in certain fields, but apply it in other areas. The sleep book _looks_ wrong, but what the hell kinda business do I have rapidly judging a book on sleep?
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @reasonisfun
Yes that’s a conundrum I face too.
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I think if you spend enough time going down a particular rabbit hole, and pursuing many different forking pathways, and seeing many dead ends that at first seemed like golden roads, you can develop a generalized skill in spotting bad reasoning in other fields.
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I think so! I wish more people would write about this; almost nothing has been afaik.
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Interesting that you both have this intuition. I'm very skeptical of the generalizability (which nonetheless being a prisoner of my own desire to generalize in this way).
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @Meaningness and
(I'm amused that we're basically seriously discussing water dowsing here...)
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I don’t think so? “What else would have to be true if this were” is pretty solid
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I don't quite mean literally. I just mean that the felt sense of it can be pretty weird. Like Feynman's confusion at his own ability to spot errors, in the bit I quoted above.
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Ah, yes, …
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