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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Naturalist Experimentation, published by LoganStrohl on May 10, 2023 on LessWrong.
Ordinarily, when someone is trying to solve a problem, experimentation is where they begin. “Things aren’t going right? Try changing something, and see what happens!” In naturalism, though, experimentation comes at the very end, if it happens at all.
There’s a balance to be kept in naturalist experimentation, and it can be a tricky one. I said in Getting Started that the naturalist stance deemphasizes most ways relating to the world, and regards the world instead as something that may reveal itself to you as you open up to it. The trick in this phase is to balance between open curiosity and agency.
By the time you’ve made it to the “Experimentation” phase in a naturalist study, you’ve spent a long time being very hands-off: Only look, do not touch; just observe, do not intervene. In the very beginning of your study, you asked your desperation to wait in the hall, then invited curiosity to take its place, in an attempt to create plenty of space for patient and direct observation. This whole time, you have tried to observe your fulcrum experience in its natural habitat, learning what happens around it by default, when you do nothing to interfere.
In this final phase, you’ll begin to interfere. You’ll deliberately interact with the systems you’ve been observing. You’ll exercise your agency.
It can be quite difficult, while getting much more hands-on with the circumstances you observe, to remain in a state of open curiosity all the while. It can be tempting to stop exploring patiently, and start trying to immediately force the outcomes you want.
I’m not here to tell you that it is wrong to force the outcomes you want, to grab onto the levers of causality that you’ve discovered and use them to guide the world into your preferred configuration. If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably in a much better position to do that wisely than you were when you started.
In this essay, I only mean to show you that it is possible to choose another way to interact with those levers, if you want to. It is possible to balance agency with patient, direct observation, in a way that causes your understanding of your topic to deepen indefinitely, rather than bringing your study to an abrupt close. Instead of switching to goal-oriented engineer mode to obtain the object-level solution that you wanted at the start, you might prefer to take a much longer path toward deep mastery of the field you’ve really only just begun to explore.
I call that longer path “naturalist experimentation”.
What is different about naturalist experimentation?
There are a couple of things that set naturalist experimentation apart from a more casual approach to exploratory experimentation, and also from scientific experimentation.
The first is why we experiment. The second is when.
Why We Experiment
When I was a kid and our television picked up stations using antennae (which we called "bunny ears"), the picture would sometimes cut out, and we’d try all sorts of things to make it come back. We’d whack the side of the TV, move the bunny ears around, stand in a different part of the room, change the channel. It was all sort of hapless and frantic; we were just changing things largely at random in the hopes that something would solve the problem, whatever it was, and the picture would come back. This is an extreme example, but here it is clear that we experimented to fix things.
In scientific experimentation, we experiment to improve our models, usually by attempting to disconfirm hypotheses generated by them. This is certainly related to naturalist experimentation, and I’ll come back to the relationship in a moment.
In naturalism, we experiment to create space for alternative action.
To get what I mean by this, it may help to think in ter...
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