Can You Infer & Picture? (part 2 of 2)

Hanna, JB, and I use a series of short passages from Stephen King’s book, “On Writing,” to explore whether you can infer and picture at the same time, and if not why not. While doing this, we make new discoveries regarding how “picturing things, one at a time” is NOT THE SAME as “picturing a story.” We also discover support for the order in which discoveries are best made (feelings, facts, stories, ideas) and why ideas first prevents new discoveries. This is part 2.

Can You Infer & Picture? (part 1 of 2)

Hanna, JB, and I use a series of short passages from Stephen King’s book, “On Writing,” to explore whether you can infer and picture at the same time, and if not why not. While doing this, we make new discoveries regarding how “picturing things, one at a time” is NOT THE SAME as “picturing a story.” We also discover support for the order in which discoveries are best made (feelings, facts, stories, ideas) and why ideas first prevents new discoveries.

Emergence University Seminar (2024-04) April | Identifying Inference 1

The takeaways here? There are quite a lot. Here are but a few.
[1] Inferences are the source of 95% of all human suffering. Maybe more.
[2] All inferences are attempts to “predict the future and in doing so, avoid future suffering.
[3] This makes seeing Inferences rather easy. Just notice when you are trying to predict the future. All inferences—even those which accurately draw on the past—are attempts to predict the future.
[4] The most egregious inferences? Hypotheses. All hypotheses are attempts to predict the future. This is true even when these predictions are done by the most talented and well-intentioned scientists.
[5] Indeed, based on this idea alone, we can say the revers is true as well—that all inferences are hypotheses. No surprise that scientists so rarely make breakthroughs. And yes, when they do, they benefit us greatly. But think of how much this success rate would increase were scientists to limit what they work with to Genuine Evidence.