The statistical worldview

[Carl-Richard]

When you're in the statistical worldview,

- you are acutely aware that many things can influence one thing, and their relationship is statistical (quantitative). Some things can have a strong influence, other things less of a strong influence, and some things only a weak influence (e.g. the butterfly effect). In reality, there is a huge web of influences, where each influence is a particular node or string on the web, and each node is weighted with a certain strength of influence or statistical value.

For example, ADHD can be influenced by beliefs, experiences, genetics, etc. Even if you think one of these things have a stronger influence, it doesn't mean it can only be reduced to that thing, and talking as if it can be reduced to that thing can lead to problems with accurately talking about and perceiving reality.

- you often say things are "probably so", "most likely", "less likely", "probably not". It does not preclude you from making firm and exclusive analytical statements (e.g. "given x and y, z is true or false, coherent or inconsistent"). But you are very acutely aware when something is statistical and probabilistic so you don't overstep or overgeneralize or oversimplify.

- you realize a thing can be many things at the same time. There is often not just one way to do things, or one thing you can do at any one time. "Should I meditate every day or should I do retreats where I meditate more deeply?" Why not both? "That's the placebo effect". Why can't it be a real effect and placebo at the same time? "Trans is social contagion". Why can't some of it be real trans and some of it be social contagion (both within and across individuals)? "Yes — both" is very often realized to be the answer.

 

The statistical worldview is a way to conceptualize nuance and holism, as opposed to black-and-white thinking and naive reductionism. It's also related to the modern scientific framework of putting numbers and quantities to these relationships. Modern science, especially human-oriented science (e.g. medicine, psychology), primes this kind of statistical thinking where everything is viewed through statistical associations (mediation, moderation, correlation) and ways of quantifying them (effect sizes, correlation coefficients, measures of statistical significance). If you do enough scientific thinking, in the right fields of science, you will eventually end up viewing a large chunk of the world this way.

Edited 1 hour ago by Carl-Richard

[Davino]

Isn't this systems thinking with emphasis on the axis of statistics in the web of relationships? 

Or are you proposing a nuance to the bayesian worldview?

Edited 10 hours ago by Davino

[Carl-Richard]

4 hours ago, Davino said:

Isn't this systems thinking with emphasis on the axis of statistics in the web of relationships?

Systems thinking is thinking with emphasis on relationships and challenging simple analytical thinking (naive reductionism: "a -> b"), often dealing with notions like complexity, circularity, context. I'm not necessarily invoking systems thinking as much as multiplistic thinking, simply acknowledging there are multiple things, and these things are related in degrees. "Multiple" is statistical, "degrees" also. Probabilistic thinking acknowledges degrees of probability of multiple outcomes; that's also statistical.

 

4 hours ago, Davino said:

Or are you proposing a nuance to the bayesian worldview?

Bayesian thinking is a very specific framework. The probabilistic aspect I'm talking about is simply about acknowledging probabilities. It's very simple.

Everybody should be familar with the concepts I'm talking about. It's just some are maybe less deeply practiced in it or less able to spot the common errors our mind makes. Especially the last paragraph about spotting how things can be two or more things at the same time. For example about the Placebo effect. People often seem to have an idea that once "placebo" is invoked, every other effect is somehow irrelevant. But it doesn't have to be that way, and it most probably isn't that way in most cases.

Edited 6 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[zurew]

I like this approach, and I mostly live by this -  but when it comes to applying it to meta frames and different meta-philosophy frames , it can get so complicated so fast that almost no one practice it at that level (or they might, but given that they are nowhere near informed about other alternative views and frames, their probability assignment will be meaningless and it will only represent a very small fraction of things that they know about).

This is not a criticism of this approach though, because the problem I proposed is not even related to this, it is related to our cognitive limitations.

 

Like it would be very cool if we would be able to do something like this - " Okay, currently here is 10000 different possible positions that can be taken on metaphyiscs , here is a 100 different theories in phil of language, here is 10000 different views on epistemology ,  here is 10000 different views on ethics  - I understand each and every one of these theories in depth and let me now create a 100 million different configurations (worldviews) using  these views and then let me think through all the possible problems under each and every one of these configurations and then let me come up with a synthesis that has the least amount of problems  with it and let me also assign a probability to each and every one of these views "

Edited 2 hours ago by zurew

[LastThursday]

It would be interesting to come up with a model of non-standard thinking. I'd say the default mode for most folks is social thinking: who did or said what to whom and why, how one person relates to another, what you feel about things. Here's a random bullet list pulled out of nowhere of different types of thinking:

• Social - you keep a ledger of interactions between things (people), you apply a value function (feelings) to those interactions
• Relational - you accept that nothing happens in isolation, everything affects everything else with varying strengths
• Systems - everything works like a machine with distinct interacting parts, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts
• Construct aware - you realise that every type of thing is an artificially constructed entity made of other things
• Causal - you know that if A and B happen, there are different scenarios for their synchronicity: A caused B, A and B were caused by C etc.
• Statistical - see @Carl-Richard
• Ambiguous - you accept that it is not possible to know the detail of causes for A and B and therefore have to conclude that A and B are equally likely even if contradictory. You know that knowledge and information are always lacking.
• Big picture - you zoom out or bring more of the world into the scenario in order to explain things, i.e. there a nearly always outside influences, outside of your knowledge.
• Meta - you constantly try and see problems from different angles, and through different paradigms, or by thinking laterally.
• Abstract - you use ideas not rooted in every day things to explain things: mathematics, language, symbols, geometry, numbers.

I also wonder if there can be a distinct progression in different styles of thinking. 

Edited 1 hour ago by LastThursday