Comments on: Charles Darwin: Bottom-up Thinker

By: mike

mike — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 23:58:48 +0000

There are so many powerless and distressed people that I believe they hunger to be a part in their own self efficacy. I don’t think there has ever been a better time to embrace the bottom – up paradigm. It is exciting, hopeful that will ultimately make us players rather than spectators in our respective lives

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By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 20:37:58 +0000

‘I’ll contend that one of the big problems with top-down thinking is a tendency to pay too much attention to abstract arguments and too little to the concrete “facts on the ground.”’

Concretes can get you only so far. Abstracts are essential to hold it all together.

By: Alex Harris

Alex Harris — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:36:05 +0000

A very good point, Tim. As Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson like to emphasize, people’s notions of science are often pretty funky. In particular with regard to evolution, they seem unable to shake this teleological notion of a quasi-conscious drive to optimize “fitness”… it’s like a god, but actually without all the god stuff:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/

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By: Timothy B Lee

Timothy B Lee — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:41:22 +0000

Thanks Richard! Good point about the link between evolution and markets.

I’ve got a custom theme in the works, and expect it to go up next week.

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:37:23 +0000

The agent of change in evolution is random mutation, the source of the variations that natural selection edits. The “random” part of it is the thing that drives the religious nuts crazy, and leads to the complaints about “God playing dice with the world” and all that kinda crazy stuff. It’s an easy notion for free marketeers to handle, because evolution has the same structure as markets: innovators do random and crazy things, and the market grades them. The market in evolution theory is the competition for food, mates, and the avoidance of predators.

I see you’re using the WordPress default theme. You might want to check out some of the optional themes and the various plugins and widgets.

And Power to the People, dude.

By: Going Solo

Going Solo — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:55:47 +0000

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By: Tim Lee

Tim Lee — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:39:27 +0000

I haven’t. I’ll have to check that out. Thanks for the pointer–and for being the first Bottom-up commenter.

By: Sarah Brodsky

Sarah Brodsky — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:36:50 +0000

Have you read Old Masters and Young Geniuses? Top-down/bottom-up sounds just like the conceptual/experimental dichotomy. Top-down explanations have an advantage in that not only are they more intuitive, but they can be generated much more quickly than explanations based on collecting lots of data.