But also my sense is that there’s some deep benefit from “having mainlines” and conversations that are mostly ‘sentences-on-mainline’?
I agree with this. Or, if you feel ~evenly split between two options, have two mainlines and focus a bunch on those (including picking at cruxes and revising your mainline view over time).
But:
Like, it feels to me like Eliezer was generating sentences on his mainline, and Richard was responding with ‘since you’re being overly pessimistic, I will be overly optimistic to balance’, with no attempt to have his response match his own mainline.
I do note that there are some situations where rushing to tell a ‘mainline story’ might be the wrong move:
Maybe your beliefs feel wildly unstable day-to-day—because you’re learning a lot quickly, or because it’s just hard to know how to assign weight to the dozens of different considerations that bear on these questions. Then trying to take a quick snapshot of your current view might feel beside the point.
It might even feel actively counterproductive, like rushing too quickly to impose meaning/structure on data when step one is to make sure you have the data properly loaded up in your head.
Maybe there are many scenarios that seem similarly likely to you. If you see ten very different ways things could go, each with ~10% subjective probability, then picking a ‘mainline’ may be hard, and may require a bunch of arbitrary-feeling choices about which similarities-between-scenarios you choose to pay attention to.
I agree with this. Or, if you feel ~evenly split between two options, have two mainlines and focus a bunch on those (including picking at cruxes and revising your mainline view over time).
But:
I do note that there are some situations where rushing to tell a ‘mainline story’ might be the wrong move:
Maybe your beliefs feel wildly unstable day-to-day—because you’re learning a lot quickly, or because it’s just hard to know how to assign weight to the dozens of different considerations that bear on these questions. Then trying to take a quick snapshot of your current view might feel beside the point.
It might even feel actively counterproductive, like rushing too quickly to impose meaning/structure on data when step one is to make sure you have the data properly loaded up in your head.
Maybe there are many scenarios that seem similarly likely to you. If you see ten very different ways things could go, each with ~10% subjective probability, then picking a ‘mainline’ may be hard, and may require a bunch of arbitrary-feeling choices about which similarities-between-scenarios you choose to pay attention to.