7 thought experiments that will make you question everything

Philosophy Experiments — Interactive Thought Experiments

Explore 27 interactive philosophy experiments that challenge your moral intuitions, test your logical reasoning, and probe the boundaries of belief.

a post-truth thought experiment · discrete blogarithm

Imagine that you had a magic machine. You tell the machine what your goals are. The machine tells you, in any situation, the optimal statement to say in order to achieve your goals, and who to say it to. The statement may or may not be true.

Experiments — ux-phi

Playable versions of canonical experiments in philosophy: the Socratic-questionnaire thought experiments — the trolley problem, Gettier cases, the side-effect effect, Mary the colour scientist.

Against theory-motivated experimentation: Can random experimental choice lead to better theories?

Scientists must choose which among many experiments to perform. We study the epistemic success of experimental choice strategies proposed by philosophers of science or executed by scientists themselves. We develop a multi-agent model of the scientific process that jointly formalizes its core aspects: active experimentation, theorizing, and social learning. We find that agents who choose new experiments at random develop the most informative and predictive theories of the world. The agents aiming to confirm, falsify theories, or resolve theoretical disagreements end up with an illusion of epistemic success: they develop promising accounts for the data they collected, while misrepresenting the ground truth that they intended to learn about. Agents experimenting in these theory-motivated ways acquire less diverse or less representative samples from the ground truth that also turn out to be easier to account for. Random data collection, on the other hand, combines virtues of diverse and representative sampling from a target scientific domain which enables cumulative development of the successful theoretical accounts of it. We suggest that randomization, already a gold standard within experiments, is also beneficial at the level of experiments themselves.

100 Little Ideas

A list of ideas, in no particular order and from different fields, that help explain how the world works…

Redecentralization

A thought experiment! Let's reimagine the web with r-selected thinking.

Redecentralization

A thought experiment! Let's reimagine the web with r-selected thinking.

Redecentralization

A thought experiment! Let's reimagine the web with r-selected thinking.

20 Things I've Learned as a Systems (Over) Thinker

This list has received positive feedback.

The brain's 7D sandcastles could be the key to consciousness | New Scientist

We’ve glimpsed mind-bending geometric structures that fleetingly encode our thoughts, memories and feelings – and could solve the greatest mystery of all

Eliciting Beliefs with Random Generation Tasks

Elicitation methods, such as asking people to produce the deciles of a distribution, are standard practices in policy or applied statistics. Similarly, much of cognitive science and psychology focuses on determining people's people's beliefs or latent traits through questionnaires or judgment tasks. However, these approaches often only capture a rough outline of what people know and are usually limited to point estimates of people's beliefs. Here, we present a novel experimental paradigm that allows us to access people's beliefs and how variable these beliefs are. Our task is based on an established random generation paradigm in which participants produce quantities from a particular domain as randomly as possible. We hypothesize that due to the minds' general-purpose mechanisms for probabilistic inferences, these random sequences represent the participants' underlying prior beliefs. We show that our method can infer participants' beliefs for a wide range of numeric quantities at comparable accuracy as an established elicitation method. Moreover, these inferred beliefs are consistent with individual participants' generalization and inference patterns in a subsequent conditional prediction task. We then extend our approach to non-numeric belief elicitation, highlighting how our method can go beyond numeric elicitation and provide insight into complex beliefs that are challenging to assess experimentally. Empirically, our results highlight that people know the rough shapes of environmental distributions, and these beliefs guide inference and generalization. Moreover, using our novel approach, we also show that people know the fine details of environmental distributions. Finally, our experimental results show that random generation paradigms can be a useful tool for cognitive scientists, psychologists, and applied statisticians.

Stanford researchers find a single question could be the key to changing someone’s mind

Curiosity goes a lot further than we might think.

The mistake we all make... and the simple experiment that reveals it

Your answer reveals how you see the world – and the common error that hampers our decision making. In an extract from his new book, psychologist Richard Nisbett reveals the ‘mindware’ to help us think smarter

77 Facts That Blew Our Minds in 2024

From The Atlantic Science Desk, 77 Facts That Blew Our Minds in 2024. Some that caught my eye: 5. Your body carries literal pieces of your mom — and maybe your

Serenity and the Myth of "Getting Out the Signal" - Reactor

We want to believe that knowledge will change the world for the better, but it's not always that simple.

experiments/second-sky/README.md at main · oaustegard/experiments

Random vibe-experiments. Contribute to oaustegard/experiments development by creating an account on GitHub.