Geoffrey Hinton on developing your own framework for understanding reality

The biggest barrier to learning from contact with reality is ourselves. It’s hard to understand a system that we are part of because we have blind spots, where we can’t see what we aren’t looking for, and don’t notice what we don’t notice.

they experiment, they explore, they adjust, they readjust, but not just in terms of having some wondrous mathematical model of the situation and updating a parameter. They form a hypothesis, maybe they have multiple hypotheses or ideas about the situation they are in, and they put more belief in the ones that work over time and throw out hypotheses

Sure, I knew that many earlier generations of humans had gotten it wrong, but there’s a huge difference between learning about other people’s false beliefs and actually learning to unbelieve things ourselves.