Against Explanations

I think we should give up on explanations. Or, at least give up on explanations in areas of science where good explanations have been hard to come by like psychology. 

We put a premium on explanations because historically we’ve felt that unless we know “why” something happens, we can’t reliably predict it or change it. Sure, human intuition has been able to predict things in psychology for millennia without any clear “whys”. But intuition isn’t inspectable, debuggable, or transferrable. Only explanations—the domain of science—are.

That’s not true anymore. AI works like human intuition, but it has more of the properties of explanations. In other words, it is more inspectable, debuggable, and transferrable. 

AI models like GPT-4 can encode intuition and can make progress in places where science hasn’t yet. We should use it to benefit humanity. 

We can find the explanations later.

.   .   .

If you look at the history of psychology, various schools of thought have come and gone purporting to explain the underlying issues that create psychological problems like anxiety and depression. 

Freudians (and their descendants) think it’s about the conflict between the unconscious and the conscious parts of the mind. They also put great emphasis on how past experiences shape our experience of the present. Cognitive behaviorists think anxious feelings come from distorted thoughts, and if you change your distorted thoughts you’ll resolve your anxious feelings. ACT adherents believe that anxiety is a feedback loop that is reinforced by attention and that if we focus less on our anxiety and more on our behaviors the anxiety will become less of a problem on its own. Somatic experiencing adherents think anxiety is a trauma response that’s trapped in the body and needs to be released. The list goes on.