Introduction: Epistemic Strategies Redux

This post examines the epistemic strategies of John Wentworth’s selection theorem posts.

(If you want to skim this post, just read the Summary subsection that display the different epistemic strategies as design patterns)

I introduced the concept in a recent post, but didn’t define them except as the “ways of producing” knowledge that are used in a piece of research. If we consider a post or paper as a computer program outputting (producing) knowledge about alignment, epistemic strategies are the underlying algorithm or, even more abstractly, the design patterns.

An example of epistemic strategy, common in natural sciences (and beyond), is

Look at the data
Find a good explanation
Predict new things with that explanation
Get new data for checking your prediction

More than just laying out some abstract recipe, analysis serves to understand how each step is done, whether that makes sense, and how each step (and the whole strategy) might fail. Just like a design pattern or an algorithm, it matters tremendously to know when to apply it and when to avoid it as well as subtleties to be aware of.

Laying this underlying structure bare matters in three ways:

It clarifies the research’s purpose and value for newcomers and researchers from other fields, with minimal assumptions of shared approaches.
- Just like a programmer switching to a new domain of problems will get up to speed faster and more reliably if they get access to the patterns/algorithms/tricks used in their new domain.
It focuses feedback and criticism on the most important parts of the idea/proposition/argument.
- Issues with an algorithm more often focus on the point of it instead of the details,whereas issues with an implementation of that algorithm can be as much about typos, optimization tricks and bad structure than about the actual core (the algorithm.
It builds a library of such strategies for alignment in particular, a cookbook newcomers and senior researchers alike can browse for inspiration or a take on some new post/paper they don’t grok.
- Like the glorious Game Programming Patterns who does exactly that for game programming

Now, before starting, I need to point out that the selection theorems posts don’t present research results; they present epistemic strategies (the eponymous theorems). Does that mean my job has already been done? Not exactly: John’s posts do presen...

Selection Effects