The effectiveness of systematic thinking — LessWrong
This is part 1/2 of my introduction to Live Theory, where I try to distill Sahil’s vision for a new way to scale intellectual progress without systematic thinking. You can find part 2 here. This post is the first part of a two-part series introducing the vision for Live theory, a design paradigm that leverages AI to build a decentralized, context-sensitive infrastructure. In this first part, I start by describing the unreasonable efficiency and the limitations of systematic thinking, the tool that live theory aims to replace. The birth of systematic thinking. Before the scientific revolution, intellectual progress could not scale well. People would have ideas about the world, make hypotheses and test them, gathering insight along the way. This would happen organically, without a deliberate understanding of the process itself. This is how craftsmen would learn to make stronger metals, painters would discover new pigments, and farmers would tweak their methods to be more effective. Howe