I think it’s coming. I’d give ~60% chance that rationality will have had its first Fosbury Flop in another five years, and ~40% chance that the first Fosbury Flop of rationality is specifically a refined and better-understood version of gears-level modelling.
The fosbury flop succeeded because there’s very clear win conditions for high jump, and it beat everyone else.
I think it’s much harder to have a fosbury flop for rationality because even if the technique is better it’s not immediately obvious and therefore far less memetic.
Missing some other necessary conditions here, but I think your point is correct.
This is a big part of why having a rationalist community matters. Presumably people had jumping competitions in antiquity, and probably at some point someone tried something Fosbury-like (and managed to not break their spine in the process). But it wasn’t until we had a big international sporting community that the conditions were set for it to spread.
Now we have a community of people who are on the lookout for better learning/modelling/problem-solving techniques, and have some decent (though far from perfect) epistemic tools in place to distinguish such things from self-help bullshit. Memetically, a Fosbury flop of rationality probably won’t be as immediately obvious a success as the Fosbury flop, since we don’t have a rationality Olympics (and if we did, it would be Goodharted). On the other hand, we have the internet, we have much faster diffusion of information, and we have a community of people who actively experiment with this sort of stuff, so it’s not obvious whether a successful new technique would spread more quickly or less on net.
The fosbury flop is a good analogy. Where i think it comes short is that rationality is indeed a much more complex thing than jumping. You would need more than just the invention and application of a technique by one person for a paradigm shift—It would at least also require distilling the technique well, learning how to teach it well, and changing the rationality cannon in light of it.
I think a paradigm shift would happen when a new rationality cannon will be created and adopted that outperforms the current sequences (very likely also containing new techniques) - and i think that’s doable (for a start, see the flaws in the sequence Eliezer himself described in the preface).
This isn’t low hanging fruit, as it would require a lot of effort from skilled and knowledgeable people, but i would say it’s at least visible fruit, so to speak.
The fosbury flop succeeded because there’s very clear win conditions for high jump, and it beat everyone else.
I think it’s much harder to have a fosbury flop for rationality because even if the technique is better it’s not immediately obvious and therefore far less memetic.
Missing some other necessary conditions here, but I think your point is correct.
This is a big part of why having a rationalist community matters. Presumably people had jumping competitions in antiquity, and probably at some point someone tried something Fosbury-like (and managed to not break their spine in the process). But it wasn’t until we had a big international sporting community that the conditions were set for it to spread.
Now we have a community of people who are on the lookout for better learning/modelling/problem-solving techniques, and have some decent (though far from perfect) epistemic tools in place to distinguish such things from self-help bullshit. Memetically, a Fosbury flop of rationality probably won’t be as immediately obvious a success as the Fosbury flop, since we don’t have a rationality Olympics (and if we did, it would be Goodharted). On the other hand, we have the internet, we have much faster diffusion of information, and we have a community of people who actively experiment with this sort of stuff, so it’s not obvious whether a successful new technique would spread more quickly or less on net.
The fosbury flop is a good analogy. Where i think it comes short is that rationality is indeed a much more complex thing than jumping. You would need more than just the invention and application of a technique by one person for a paradigm shift—It would at least also require distilling the technique well, learning how to teach it well, and changing the rationality cannon in light of it.
I think a paradigm shift would happen when a new rationality cannon will be created and adopted that outperforms the current sequences (very likely also containing new techniques) - and i think that’s doable (for a start, see the flaws in the sequence Eliezer himself described in the preface).
This isn’t low hanging fruit, as it would require a lot of effort from skilled and knowledgeable people, but i would say it’s at least visible fruit, so to speak.
The obvious candidate for the Rationalist Fosbury flop is the development of good Forecasting environment/software/culture/theory etc.