Fwiw, I generally find Quintin’s writing unclear and difficult to read (I bounce a lot) and Nora’s clear and easy, even though I agree with Quintin slightly more (although I disagree with both of them substantially).
I do think there is something to “views that are very different from ones own” being difficult to understand, sometimes, although I think this can be for a number of reasons. Like, for me at least, understanding someone with very different beliefs can be both time intensive and cognitively demanding—I usually have to sit down and iterate on “make up a hypothesis of what I think they’re saying, then go back and check if that’s right, update hypothesis, etc.” This process can take hours or days, as the cruxes tend to be deep and not immediately obvious.
Usually before I’ve spent significant time on understanding writing in this way, e.g. during the first few reads, I feel like I’m bouncing, or otherwise find myself wanting to leave. But I think the bouncing feeling is (in part) tracking that the disagreement is really pervasive and that I’m going to have to put in a bunch of effort if I actually want to understand it, rather than that I just don’t like that they disagree with me.
Because of this, I personally get a lot of value out of interacting with friends who have done the “translating it closer to my ontology” step—it reduces the understanding cost a lot for me, which tends to be higher the further from my worldview the writing is.
Yeah, for me the early development of shard theory work was confusing for similar reasons. Quintin framed values as contextual decision influences and thought these were fundamental, while I’d absorbed from Eliezer that values were like a utility function. They just think in very different frames. This is why science is so confusing until one frame proves useful and is established as a Kuhnian paradigm.
Fwiw, I generally find Quintin’s writing unclear and difficult to read (I bounce a lot) and Nora’s clear and easy, even though I agree with Quintin slightly more (although I disagree with both of them substantially).
I do think there is something to “views that are very different from ones own” being difficult to understand, sometimes, although I think this can be for a number of reasons. Like, for me at least, understanding someone with very different beliefs can be both time intensive and cognitively demanding—I usually have to sit down and iterate on “make up a hypothesis of what I think they’re saying, then go back and check if that’s right, update hypothesis, etc.” This process can take hours or days, as the cruxes tend to be deep and not immediately obvious.
Usually before I’ve spent significant time on understanding writing in this way, e.g. during the first few reads, I feel like I’m bouncing, or otherwise find myself wanting to leave. But I think the bouncing feeling is (in part) tracking that the disagreement is really pervasive and that I’m going to have to put in a bunch of effort if I actually want to understand it, rather than that I just don’t like that they disagree with me.
Because of this, I personally get a lot of value out of interacting with friends who have done the “translating it closer to my ontology” step—it reduces the understanding cost a lot for me, which tends to be higher the further from my worldview the writing is.
Yeah, for me the early development of shard theory work was confusing for similar reasons. Quintin framed values as contextual decision influences and thought these were fundamental, while I’d absorbed from Eliezer that values were like a utility function. They just think in very different frames. This is why science is so confusing until one frame proves useful and is established as a Kuhnian paradigm.