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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 29 Nov 2018
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      A mystery is an opportunity to do some ontological creative destruction in your head. Eliminate a dog that isn’t pulling its weight epistemologically, or a god that’s half-assing too many things.

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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 29 Nov 2018
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      Whether a Thing in your head is a god or a dog is actually a relative rather than an absolute condition. A god explains more than other Things, a dog explains less. Gods weaken into either average Things, or turn into dogs and are at risk of being fired. Darwin in your head.

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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 29 Nov 2018
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      “Compression” can be viewed as eliminating both dogs and gods from your ontology so you have the fewest possible, equally hard-working ontological primitives in your head. Euclid’s fifth postulate was fired for doing too little. As were aether and phlogiston and other goddogs.

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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 29 Nov 2018
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      In general, try to solve mysteries with Holmes’ law. Start with the obvious (abduction), eliminate the impossible (deduction), make less obvious things more obvious (discovery/investigation), repeat till you’re down to 1 explanation. Confirm with further tests (induction)

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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 29 Nov 2018
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      But there should be no *mysterious* loose ends. Lestrade and Japp always make the same mistake which Holmes and Poirot don’t: dismiss seemingly trivial loose ends. Holmes and Poirot have a lower threshold for mystification. They won’t accept implausible accounts even for trivia.

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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 29 Nov 2018
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      They know that Holmes’ law and ISCN only apply in a closed set. Eliminating the impossible in an open set with explanandum “leaks” doesn’t get you certainty. Just makes you inclined to feed confirmation bias by ignoring “coincidences” or implausibly explaining away “trivialities“

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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 29 Nov 2018
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      Mysteries don’t care about importance. Small mysteries have to be explained as plausibly as big mysteries. Reasonable doubt creeps in as surely through an unimportant implausibility as an important one. *Entire world views are only as plausible as their least plausible argument.*

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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 29 Nov 2018
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      But occasionally, this approach will stall and you’ll be faced with a genuine rather than apparent mystery. You’ll need to follow Dirk Gently’s law: don’t eliminate the impossible. Ie entertain the possibility of needing to adding/eliminating primitives.

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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 29 Nov 2018
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      Removing god from “mystery of wall stain” is trivial. Removing god from “creation of life” is not. Adding is never trivial. You can’t add just a local ghost to explain a case. You must add ‘ghost’ as a base class to universe (you have inescapable existence proof).

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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 29 Nov 2018
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      Removing a dog — ontological primitive that has very few explanations it is needed in — is something like extinction. Beyond a point, it is doomed as a breeding, self-perpetuating, employed Thing, and any loss of an explanatory contest “job” might be the last.

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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 29 Nov 2018
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      Anyhow, that’s it for my elucidation of the mystery of mysteries. Stay mentally healthy and computationally robust by constantly solving both Holmesian apparent, or epistemological, mysteries and Gentlyian ontological ones. Head Darwinism ftw.

      12:29 PM - 29 Nov 2018
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      • Michele Luke Gibson 🕊🌊👾👑 gplewis resists reputation and being known visa is working on his ebook
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        1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 29 Nov 2018
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          See Kathleen Belin’s essay “The Game’s Afoot: Predecessors and Pursuits of a Postmodern Detective Novel” (in Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction) for some of the background that inspired this thread.https://amzn.to/2rbzRSL 

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