I am of the belief that counterfactuals are socially constructed to an extent and so it might be useful for someone from a social science background to investigate this—at least if you think there’s value in MIRI’s research agenda.
The comment about counterfactuals makes me think about computational cognitive scientist Tobias Gerstenberg’s research (https://cicl.stanford.edu), where his research focuses a lot on counterfactual reasoning in the physical domain, but he also has work in the social domain.
I confess to only a surface-level understanding of MIRI’s research agenda, so I’m not quite able to connect my understanding of counterfactual reasoning in the social domain to a concrete research question within MIRI’s agenda. I’d be happy to hear more though if you had more detail!
I am of the belief that counterfactuals are socially constructed to an extent and so it might be useful for someone from a social science background to investigate this—at least if you think there’s value in MIRI’s research agenda.
The comment about counterfactuals makes me think about computational cognitive scientist Tobias Gerstenberg’s research (https://cicl.stanford.edu), where his research focuses a lot on counterfactual reasoning in the physical domain, but he also has work in the social domain.
I confess to only a surface-level understanding of MIRI’s research agenda, so I’m not quite able to connect my understanding of counterfactual reasoning in the social domain to a concrete research question within MIRI’s agenda. I’d be happy to hear more though if you had more detail!
I’ve written a post on this topic here—https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9rtWTHsPAf2mLKizi/counterfactuals-as-a-matter-of-social-convention.
BTW, I should be clear that my opinions on this topic aren’t necessarily a mainstream position.