I may be late in the game here, but I found this chapter much less effective than the previous four, and I updated hard from “This book might resonate outside the LW community” towards “This will definitely not resonate outside the LW community.” Maybe the community is the target, full stop, but that seems unnecessarily modest. The thing that most bothered me was that the conversations are full of bits that feel like Eliezer unnecessarily personalizing, which reads like bragging, e.g.:
When I try to explain a phenomenon, I’m also implicitly relying on my ability to use a technique like “don’t even start to rationalize,” which is a skill that I started practicing at age 15 and that took me a decade to hone to a reliable and productive form.
But from my perspective, there’s no choice.
From the perspective of somebody like me,
I’m having a hard time describing exactly why I found these so off-putting, but I think it has to do with the ways LW gets described as a cult. The more I think about it, the more I think that this is a problem with the framing of conversations in the first place: it’s hard to avoid looking like a git when you pick three examples of being smarter than other people, even with the caveat up front that you know you’re being unfair about it.
This chapter also felt much more densely packed with Rationalist vernacular, e.g. “epistemic harm”, “execute the ‘[...]’ technique”, “obvious failure mode”, “doing the hard cognitive labor”, and to a lesser extent, Silicon Valley vernacular (most of part iii). Sometimes you have to introduce new terms, but each time burns inferential distance points, and sometimes even weirdness points.
I may be late in the game here, but I found this chapter much less effective than the previous four, and I updated hard from “This book might resonate outside the LW community” towards “This will definitely not resonate outside the LW community.” Maybe the community is the target, full stop, but that seems unnecessarily modest. The thing that most bothered me was that the conversations are full of bits that feel like Eliezer unnecessarily personalizing, which reads like bragging, e.g.:
I’m having a hard time describing exactly why I found these so off-putting, but I think it has to do with the ways LW gets described as a cult. The more I think about it, the more I think that this is a problem with the framing of conversations in the first place: it’s hard to avoid looking like a git when you pick three examples of being smarter than other people, even with the caveat up front that you know you’re being unfair about it.
This chapter also felt much more densely packed with Rationalist vernacular, e.g. “epistemic harm”, “execute the ‘[...]’ technique”, “obvious failure mode”, “doing the hard cognitive labor”, and to a lesser extent, Silicon Valley vernacular (most of part iii). Sometimes you have to introduce new terms, but each time burns inferential distance points, and sometimes even weirdness points.