Mysterious Answer

“I have already remarked that nothing is inherently mysterious—nothing that actually exists, that is. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon; to worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious is to worship your own ignorance; a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory, it is just somewhere we haven’t visited yet, etc., etc. . . . Which is to say that everything—everything that actually exists—is liable to end up in “the dull catalogue of common things,” sooner or later.” (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality)

Some good thoughts here regarding Mysterious Answer and Map and Territory

“We read history but we don’t live it, we don’t experience it. If only I had personally postulated astrological mysteries and then discovered Newtonian mechanics, postulated alchemical mysteries and then discovered chemistry, postulated vitalistic mysteries and then discovered biology. I would have thought of my Mysterious Answer and said to myself: No way am I falling for that again.” (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality)

Pretend like you have lived history, so that you can realize the flaws in prior ways of thinking and not fall for those same mistakes again. I also like the idea of Mysterious Answer and trying to understand when you’re falling for one.

“But the deeper failure is supposing that an answer can be mysterious. If a phenomenon feels mysterious, that is a fact about our state of knowledge, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. The vitalists saw a mysterious gap in their knowledge, and postulated a mysterious stuff that plugged the gap. In doing so, they mixed up the map with the territory. All confusion and bewilderment exist in the mind, not in encapsulated substances.” (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality)

Another good explanation about Mysterious Answer

“I also realized that if I had actually experienced the past—if I had lived through past scientific revolutions myself, rather than reading about them in history books—I probably would not have made the same mistake again. I would not have come up with another mysterious answer; the first thousand lessons would have hammered home the moral. So (I thought), to feel sufficiently the force of history, I should try to approximate the thoughts of an Eliezer who had lived through history—I should try to think as if everything I read about in history books had actually happened to me. (With appropriate reweighting for the availability bias of history books—I should remember being a thousand peasants for every ruler.) I should immerse myself in history, imagine living through eras I only saw as ink on paper.” (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality)

Relevant to Mysterious Answer and Appreciate lessons of history by imagining you lived through them