Which is false. This pushes as far in the opposite wrong direction as the viewpoint it means to criticize.
Evolutionary biology, the non-epistemological part of the exposition of quantum mechanics, and of course heuristics and biases, are all not original. They don’t look deceptively original either; they cite or attributed-quote the sources from which they’re taken. I have yet to encounter anyone who thinks the Sequences are more original than they are.
When it comes to the part that isn’t reporting on standard science, the parts that are mostly dealt with by modern “philosophers” rather than experimental scientists of one kind or another, the OP is vastly overstating how much of the Sequences are similar to the standard stuff out there. There is such a vast variety of philosophy that you can often find a conclusion similar to anything, to around the same degree that Leibniz’s monadology anticipated timeless quantum mechanics, i.e., not very much. The motivations, the arguments by which things are pinned down, the exact form of the conclusions, and what is done with those conclusions, is most of the substance—finding a conclusion that happens to look vaguely similar does not mean that I was reporting someone else’s academic work and failing to cite it, or reinventing work that had already been done. It is not understating any sort of “close agreement” with even those particular concluders, let alone the field as a whole within which those are small isolated voices. Hofstadter’s superrationality is an acknowledged informal forerunner of TDT. But finding other people who think you ought to cooperate in the PD, but can’t quite formalize why, is not the same as TDT being preinvented. (Also TDT doesn’t artifically sever decision nodes from anything upstream; the idea is that observing your algorithm, but not its output, is supposed to screen off things upstream. This is “similar” to some attempts to rescue evidential decision theory by e.g. Eels, but not quite the same thing when it comes to important details like not two-boxing on Newcomb’s Problem.) And claiming that in principle philosophical intuitions arise within the brain is not the same as performing any particular dissolution of a confused question, or even the general methodology of dissolution as practiced and described by Yudkowsky or Drescher (who actually does agree and demonstrate the method in detail within “Good and Real”).
I’m also still not sure that Luke quite understands what the metaethics sequence is trying to say, but then I consider that sequence to have basically failed at exposition anyway. Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can point Luke or anyone else at which says the same thing in more academic language.
Several of these citations are from after the originals were written! Why not (falsely) claim that academia is just agreeing with the Sequences, instead?
I don’t understand what the purpose of this post was supposed to be—what positive consequence it was supposed to have. Lots of the Sequences are better exposition of existing ideas about evolutionary biology or cognitive biases or probability theory or whatever, which are appropriately quoted or cited within them? Yes, they are. People introducing Less Wrong should try to refer to those sources as much as possible when it comes to things like heuristics and biases, rather than talking like Eliezer Yudkowsky somehow invented the idea of scope insensitivity, so that they don’t sound like phyg victims? Double yes. But writing something that predictably causes some readers to get the impression that ideas presented within the Sequences are just redoing the work of other academics, so that they predictably tweet,
...I do not think the creation of this misunderstanding benefits anyone. It is also a grave sin to make it sound like you’re speaking for a standard academic position when you’re not!
And I think Luke is being extremely charitable in his construal of what’s “already” been done in academia. If some future anti-Luke is this charitable in construing how much of future work in epistemology and decision theory was “really” all done within the Sequences back in 2008, they will claim that everything was just invented by Eliezer Yudkowsky way back then—and they will be wrong—and I hope somebody argues with that anti-Luke too, and doesn’t let any good feeling for ol E. Y. stand in their way, just like we shouldn’t be prejudiced here by wanting to affiliate with academia or something.
I get what this is trying to do. There’s a spirit in LW which really is a spirit that exists in many other places, you can get it from Feynman, Hofstadter, the better class of science fiction, Tooby and Cosmides, many beautiful papers that were truly written to explain things as simply as possible, the same place I got it. (Interesting side note: John Tooby is apparently an SF fan who grew up reading van Vogt and Null-A, so he got some of his spirit from the same sources I did! There really is an ancient and honorable tradition out there.) If someone encounters that spirit in LW for the first time, they’ll think I invented it. Which I most certainly did not. If LW is your first introduction to these things, then you really aren’t going to know how much of the spirit I learned from the anncient masters… because just reading a citation, or even a paragraph-long quote, isn’t going to convey that at all. The only real way for people to learn better is to go out and read Language in Thought and Action or The Psychological Foundations of Culture. Doing this, I would guess, gave Luke an epiphany he’s trying to share—there’s a whole world out there, not just LW the way I first thought. But the OP doesn’t do that. It doesn’t get people to read the literature. Why should they? From what they can see, it’s already been presented to them on LW, after all. So they won’t actually read the literature and find out for themselves that it’s not what they’ve already read.
There’s literature out there which is written in the same spirit as LW, but with different content. Now that’s an exciting message. It might even get people to read things.
the OP is vastly overstating how much of the Sequences are similar to the standard stuff out there… I think Luke is being extremely charitable in his construal of what’s “already” been done in academia
Do you have a Greasemonkey script that rips all the qualifying words out of my post, or something? I said things like:
“Eliezer’s posts on evolution mostly cover material you can find in any good evolutionary biology textbook”
“much of the Quantum Physics sequence can be found in quantum physics textbooks”
“Eliezer’s metaethics sequences includes dozens of lemmas previously discussed by philosophers”
“Eliezer’s free will mini-sequence includes coverage of topics not usually mentioned when philosophers discuss free will (e.g. Judea Pearl’s work on causality), but the conclusion is standard compatibilism.”
“[Eliezer’s posts] suggest that many philosophical problems can be dissolved into inquiries into the cognitive mechanisms that produce them, as also discussed in”
“[Eliezer’s posts] make the point that value is complex, a topic explored in more detail in...”
Your comment above seems to be reacting to a different post that I didn’t write, one that includes (false) claims like: “The motivations, the arguments by which things are pinned down, the exact form of the conclusions are mostly the same between The Sequences and previous work in mainstream academia.”
I have yet to encounter anyone who thinks the Sequences are more original than they are.
Really? This is the default reaction I encounter. Notice that when the user ‘Thomas’ below tried to name just two things he thought were original with you, he got both of them wrong.
Here’s a report of my experiences:
People have been talking about TDT for years but nobody seems to have noticed Spohn until HamletHenna and I independently stumbled on him this summer.
I do find it hard to interpret the metaethics sequence, so I’m not sure I grok everything you’re trying to say there. Maybe you can explain it to me sometime. In any case, when it comes to the pieces of it that can be found elsewhere, I almost never encounter anyone who knows their earlier counterparts in (e.g.) Railton & Jackson — unless I’m speaking to someone who has studied metaethics before, like Carl.
A sizable minority of people I talk to about dissolving questions are familiar with the logical positivists, but almost none of them are familiar with the recent cogsci-informed stuff, like Shafir (1998) or Talbot (2009).
Here’s a specific story. I once told Anna that once I read about intelligence explosion I understood right away that it would be disastrous by default, because human values are incredibly complex. She seemed surprised and a bit suspicious and said “Why, had you read Joshua Greene?” I said “Sure, but he’s just one tip of a very large iceberg of philosophical and scientific work demonstrating the complexity of value. I was convinced of the complexity of value long ago by metaethics and moral psychology in general.”
Several of these citations are from after the originals were written! Why not (falsely) claim that academia is just agreeing with the Sequences, instead?
Let’s look at them more closely:
Lots of cited textbooks were written after the Sequences, because I wanted to point people to up-to-date sources, but of course they mostly summarize results that are a decade old or older. This includes books like Glimcher (2010) and Dolan & Sharot (2011).
Batson (2011) is a summary of Batson’s life’s work on altruism in humans, almost all of which was published prior to the Sequences.
Spohn (2012) is just an update to Spohn’s pre-Sequences on work on his TDT-ish decision theory, included for completeness.
Talbot (2009) is the only one I see that is almost entirely composed of content that originates after the Sequences, and it too was included for completeness immediately after another work written before the Sequences: Sharif (1998).
I don’t understand what the purpose of this post was supposed to be—what positive consequence it was supposed to have.
That’s too bad, since I answered this question at the top of the post. I am trying to counteract these three effects:
Some readers will mistakenly think that common Less Wrong views are more parochial than they really are.
Some readers will mistakenly think Eliezer’s Sequences are more original than they really are.
If readers want to know more about the topic of a given article, it will be more difficult for them to find the related works in academia than if those works had been cited in Eliezer’s article.
I find problem #1 to be very common, and a contributor to the harmful, false, and popular idea that Less Wrong is a phyg. I’ve been in many conversations in which (1) someone starts out talking as though Less Wrong views are parochial and weird, and then (2) I explain the mainstream work behind or similar to every point they raise as parochial and weird, and then (3) after this happens 5 times in a row they seem kind of embarrassed and try to pretend like they never said things suggesting that Less Wrong views are parochial and weird, and ask me to email them some non-LW works on these subjects.
Problem #2 is common (see the first part of this comment), and seems to lead to phygish hero worship, as has been pointed out before.
Problem #3, I should think, is uncontroversial. Many of your posts have citations to related work, most of them do not (as is standard practice in the blogosphere), and like I said I don’t think it would have been a good idea for you to spend time digging up citations instead of writing the next blog post.
writing something that predictably causes some readers to get the impression that ideas presented within the Sequences are just redoing the work of other academics, so that they predictably tweet …I do not think the creation of this misunderstanding benefits anyone
Predictable misunderstandings are the default outcome of almost anything 100+ people read. There’s always a trade-off between maximal clarity, readability, and other factors. But, I’m happy to tweak my original post to try to counteract this specific misunderstanding. I’ve added the line: “(edit: probably most of their content is original)”.
[Further reading, I would guess] gave Luke an epiphany he’s trying to share—there’s a whole world out there, not just LW the way I first thought.
Remember that I came to LW with a philosophy and cogsci (especially rationality) background, and had been blogging about biases and metaethics and probability theory and so on at CommonSenseAtheism.com for years prior to encountering LW.
I get what this is trying to do. There’s a spirit in LW which really is a spirit that exists in many other places, you can get it from Feynman, Hofstadter, the better class of science fiction, Tooby and Cosmides, many beautiful papers that were truly written to explain things as simply as possible, the same place I got it.
That is definitely not the spirit of my post. If you’ll recall, I once told you that if all human writing were about to be destroyed except for one book of our choosing, I’d go with The Sequences. You can’t get the kind of thing that CFAR is doing solely from Feynman, Kahneman, Stanovich, etc. And you can’t get FAI solely from Good, Minsky, and Wallach — not even close. Again, I get the sense you’re reacting to a post with different phrasing than the one I actually wrote.
So they won’t actually read the literature and find out for themselves that it’s not what they’ve already read.
Most people won’t read the literature either you or I link to. But many people will, like Wei Dai.
Case in point: Remember Benja’s recent post on UDT that you praised as “Original scientific research on saving the world”? Benja himself wrote that the idea for that post clicked for him as a result of reading one of the papers on logical uncertainty I linked to from So You Want to Save the World.
Most people won’t read my references. But some of those who do will go on to make a sizable difference as a result. And that is one of the reasons I cite so many related works, even if they’re not perfectly identical to the thing me or somebody else is doing.
Most people won’t read my references. But some of those who do will go on to make a sizable difference as a result. And that is one of the reasons I cite so many related works, even if they’re not perfectly identical to the thing me or somebody else is doing.
FWIW, Luke’s rigorous citation of references has been absurdly useful to me when doing my research. It’s one of the aspects of reading LW that makes it worthwhile and productive.
Luke is already aware that I’ve utilized his citations to a great extent, but I wanted to publicly thank him for all that awesome work. I’d also like to thank others who have done similar things, such as Klevador. We need more of this.
I think a valid criticism can be made that while you were trying to counteract these three effects (which is clearly an important and useful effort), you didn’t take enough care to avoid introducing a new effect, of making some people think the Sequences are less original than they actually are. (For example you didn’t ask Eliezer to double check your descriptions of how the Sequences posts relate to the academic works, and you didn’t give some examples of where the Sequences are original.)
This is bad because in addition to communicating various ideas, the Sequences also serve as evidence of Eliezer’s philosophy and rationality talents/skills, which is useful for potential donors/supporters to judge the likely future effectiveness of the Singularity Institute in achieving its goals.
I agree I could have spent a paragraph reinforcing the originality of The Sequences.
As for asking Eliezer to check the article before posting: I’ve sent Eliezer things for feedback before, and he usually doesn’t give feedback on them until after I stop waiting and post them to LW. But as a result of this post, we’ve arranged a new heuristic: If I think Eliezer plausibly disagrees with a thing I’m going to post to LW, I’ll give him a chance to give feedback on it before I post it.
From a donor point of view, the question is as much whether Eliezer has made relevant lessons a true part of him as whether he has done original work.
The Sequences are neither necessary nor sufficient to get funding to do actual research (although I hope they are helpful in obtaining funding for research).
On complexity of value, I didn’t see anyone talking about the details of neuroeconomics nor the neuroscientific distinction between “pleasure” and “desire” until I started posting about them
Yvain has posted more than once on this, although with less detail and referencing.
Do you have a Greasemonkey script that rips all the qualifying words out of my post, or something?
All readers have a Greasemonkey script that rips all the qualifying words out of a post. This is a natural fact of writing and reading.
Your comment above seems to be reacting to a different post that I didn’t write
Not the post you wrote—the post that the long-time LWer who Twittered “Eliezer’s Yudkowsky’s Sequences are mostly not original” read. The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable—like you’re living in an authorial should-universe. Of course somebody’s going to read that post and think “Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences are mostly not original”! Of course that’s going to be the consequence of writing it! And maybe it’s just because I was reading it instead of writing it myself, without having all of your intentions so prominently in my mind, but I don’t see why on Earth you’d expect any other message to come across than that. A few qualifying words don’t have the kind of power it takes to stop that from happening!
All readers have a Greasemonkey script that rips all the qualifying words out of a post… I don’t see why on Earth you’d expect any other message to come across than [“Eliezer’s Sequences are mostly not original”].
Do you think most readers misinterpreted my post in that way? I doubt it. It looks to me like one person tweeted “Eliezer’s Sequences mostly not original” — a misinterpretation of my post which I’ve now explicitly denied near the top of the post.
My guess now would be that I probably underestimate the degree to which readers misinterpreted my post (because my own intentions were clear in my mind, illusion of transparency), and that you probably overestimate the degree to which readers misinterpreted my post (because you seem to have initially misinterpreted it, and that misinterpretation diminishes several years of cognitive work that you are justly proud of).
Also: you seem to be focusing on the one tweeted misinterpretation and not taking into account that we have evidence that the post is also achieving its explicitly stated goals, as evidenced by many of the comments on this thread: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
It is very easy to read the sequences and think that you think the philosophical thought is original to you. Other than the FAI stuff and decision theory stuff, is that true?
What exactly is wrong with being thought of as a very high-end popularizer? That material is incredibly well presented.
Additionally, people who disagree with your philosophical positions ought not be put in the (EDIT: position) of needing to reinvent the philosophical wheel to engage critically with your essays.
Additionally, people who disagree with your philosophical positions ought not be put in the power of needing to reinvent the philosophical wheel to engage critically with your essays.
Of course somebody’s going to read that post and think “Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences are mostly not original”! Of course that’s going to be the consequence of writing it!
Only a single conclusion is possible: LukeProg is a TRAITOR!
Only a single conclusion is possible: LukeProg is a TRAITOR!
I can understand why this would be negatively received by some—it is clearly hyperbole with a degree of silliness involved. That said—and possibly coincidentally—there is a serious point here. In fact it is the most salient point I noticed when reading the post and initial responses.
In most social hierarchies this post would be seen as a betrayal. An unusually overt and public political move against Eliezer. Not necessarily treason, betrayal of the tribe, it is a move against a rival. Of course it would certainly be in the interest of the targeted rival to try to portray the move as treason (or heresy, or whatever other kind of betrayal of the tribe rather than mere personal conflict.)
The above consideration is why I initially expected Eliezer to agree to a larger extent than he did (which evidently wasn’t very much!) Before making public statements of a highly status sensitive nature regarding an ally the typical political actor will make sure they aren’t offending them—they don’t take the small risk establishing an active rivalry unless they are certain the payoffs are worth it.
This (definitely!) isn’t to say that any of the above applies to this situation. Rationalists are weird and in particular can have an unusual relationship between their intellectual and political expression. ie. They sometimes go around saying what they think.
The thought that Luke was trying to sabotage my position, consciously or unconsciously, honestly never crossed my mind until I read this comment. Having now considered the hypothesis rather briefly, I assign it a rather low probability. Luke’s not like that.
It is perhaps worth noting that wedrifid didn’t say anything about motives (conscious or otherwise).
Whether I believe someone is trying to sabotage my position (consciously or unconsciously) is a different question from whether I believe they are making a move against me in a shared social hierarchy. (Although each is evidence for the other, of course.)
With both your comment here and your comments on the troll-fee issue I’ve found you coming across as arrogant. This perception seems to roughly match the response that other people have had to those comments as well, since most people disagreed with you in both areas (judging by number of upvotes). I hadn’t perceived you that way before now, so I’m wondering if something happened to you recently that’s altered the way you post or the way you think. This change is for the worse; I want my old model of Eliezer Yudkowsky back!
Frankly, I have found the sequences to be primarily useful for condensing concepts that I already had inside my head. The ideas expressed in almost all of the sequences are blatantly obvious, but they come across as catchy and often are reducible to a quick phrase. Their value lies in the fact that they make it easy to internalize certain ideas so that they’re more readily accessible to me. They also helped clarify the boundaries of some concepts, to a certain extent. The sequences have provided me with a useful terminology, but I don’t think they’ve offered me much else.
What ideas do you believe to be original that you’ve produced?
Is there a reason that defending the originality of the sequences is so important to you?
While it wasn’t perfectly phrased, I understand where chaosmosis is coming from: I too get the sense that Eliezer is responding significantly less well to criticism, both by misinterpreting or straw-manning what other people have written and letting negative emotions influence what he writes. However, I don’t think that one draw a line through two data points: after all, what I regard as Eliezer’s best response to criticism, Reply to Holden on ‘Tool AI’, was written well after the Sequences.
I have never read the sequences. After reading Luke’s post, I am much less likely to: the impression given is the sequences are generally idiosyncratic takes which recapitulate an already existing and better organized literature. I also think it is more likely the sequences are overrated, either through readers being unaware their (or similar) insights have already been made, or lacking the technical background to critique them.
It also downgraded my estimate of the value of EY’s work. Although I was pretty sceptical, I knew there was at least some chance that the sequences really were bursting with new insights and that LW really was streets ahead of mainstream academia. This now seems much less likely—although I don’t think EY is a plagiarist, it seems most of the sequences aren’t breaking new ground, but summarizing/unwittingly recapitulating insights that have already been made and taken further elsewhere.
So I can see the motivation for EY to defend that their originality: his stock goes down if the sequences are neat summaries but nothing that new rather than bursting with new and important insights, and EY’s stock is important for things like donations, public perception of him and the SI, etc. (Both my likelihood of donating and my regard for SI has been lowered a bit by this post and comments). However, EY’s way of responding to (weakly implied) criticism with catty arrogance compounds the harm.
If you are at all interested in rationality it would be a huge shame for you to skip the Sequences.
Yes, a lot of the material in the Sequences could also be obtained by reading very very carefully a few hundred impenetrable scholarly books that most people have never heard of in five or ten different disciplines, supplemented by a few journal articles, plus some additional insights by “reading between the lines”, plus drawing all the necessary connections between them. But you will not do this.
The Sequences condense all that information, put it in a really fun, really fascinating format, and transfer all of it into the deepest levels of your brain in a way that those hundred books wouldn’t. And then there’s some really valuable new material. Luke and Eliezer can argue whether the new material is 30% of the Sequences or 60% of the Sequences, but either number is still way more output than most people will produce over their entire lives.
If your worry is that they will just be recapitulating things you already know, I am pretty doubtful; I don’t know your exact knowledge level, but they were pretty exciting for me when I first read them and I had college degrees in philosophy and psychology which are pretty much the subjects covered. And if they are new to you, then from a “whether you should read them” point of view it doesn’t matter if Eliezer copied them verbatim off Wikipedia.
Seriously. Read the Sequences. Luke, who is the one arguing against their originality above, says that they are the one book he would like to save if there was an apocalypse. I would have to think a long time before saying the same but they’re certainly up there.
Also, as a fellow doctor interested in utiltiarianism/efficient charity, I enjoyed your blog and associated links.
Luke and Eliezer can argue whether the new material is 30% of the Sequences or 60% of the Sequences...
For the record, when I read Eliezer’s comments about the originality of The Sequences, it sounds to me like he and I have pretty much the same estimate of how original The Sequences are.
The sequences need a summary like the one you just wrote, the way books have a summary on the cover. Maybe this should be taken as a hint that you’d get more mileage out of the sequences with a really good description placed prominently in front of them. That could quickly re-frame non-originality claims as being irrelevant by plainly stating that they’re an accessible and entertaining way to learn about logic and bias (implying that the presentation is valuable even if some of the content can be found elsewhere), with (whatever amount) of new content on X, Y, Z topics. If you choose to write such a description, I’d really like to know what you got out of them that your philosophy and psychology degrees didn’t give you.
The sequences need a second edition. It’s sheer hubris to think that nothing has changed in four years.
There would be room for improvement even without anything changing. They were produced as daily blog posts for the purpose of forcing Eliezer to get his thoughts down on a page.
I hadn’t expected you to disagree with that tweet, so I’m clearly getting something wrong. I wrote that in the hope that it would encourage people to read the Sequences, not put them off—I think people imagine it as this million-word work of revelation, but a very large part of what it is is a work of popular science—turning people on to good existing ideas in psychology and philosophy and biology and physics and suchlike. There is a great deal that is original and valuable in there, but I don’t think of it as the majority of the material.
Except on Wikipedia (where it’s usually an euphemism for ‘crackpottish’). ;-)
(As someone on a Wikipedia talk page once said—quoting from memory, “if we aren’t allowed to [do X] the allowed band between original research and plagiarism becomes dangerously narrow”.)
Right, but I had hoped that the result would be that someone would follow the link in the tweet, after which they find out some things that may cause them to feel more positively.
So, yeah, I don’t think you’d encourage anyone to read anything by calling it “not original”.
I don’t know anything about the friends ciphergoth is attempting to reach, but I observe that in religion, “original” would be the greater turn-off. In religion, every innovation is heretical, because it is an innovation. To be accepted it must be presented as “not original”, either because it is exactly in accordance with official doctrine, or because it is a return to the true religion that the official doctrine has departed from. It is rare for a religion to successfully introduce a new prophet with the power to sweep away the old, and even then (“I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil”) the pretence is maintained that no such thing has happened.
Someone who doesn’t want to read science-y stuff because they have that kind of mindset is not going to suddenly become curious when someone tells them it’s based on science-y stuff from less than 30 years ago.
I like to think of it temporally; that religion is much like rationalists facing the wrong direction. Both occasionally look over their shoulders to confirm their beliefs (although with theists it’s more like throwing a homunculus into the distant past and using that for eyes), while most of the time the things we really care about and find exciting are in front of us. Original vs unoriginal with respect to modern thought is of no practical interest to someone with the “every innovation is heretical” mindset unless it is completely within their usual line of sight—heretical is code for “I don’t want to keep looking over my shoulder”, not “I hate the original on principle”. So unless you put that “original” encouragement thousands of years ago where they can see it, where it’s a matter of one in front and one behind, the distinction between which is the greater turn-off is not going to matter, or bait anyone into turning around—there is nothing in their usually observed world to relate it to.
Thinking about it further though, this makes something of a nonsense of the original tweet, since it’s hard to think what would count as “mostly original” by this standard. You might as well describe eg The Better Angels of Our Nature as “mostly not original” since it contains no original research but presents a synthesis of the research of others, building up to a common theme.
The problem I have is that if I say something that sounds positive about the Sequences, that’s going to turn my friends off, since they already know I think well of them. By saying something that on first reading sounds negative, I might get their interest, but that only works if they go on to follow the link.
The problem I have is that if I say something that sounds positive about the Sequences, that’s going to turn my friends off, since they already know I think well of them.
For example, they may be turned off if you came out and said “The sequences really aren’t the parochial ramblings of an intellectual outcast, they are totally in accord with mainstream scientific thinking”. But “mostly not original” conveys much of the same message by making a concession to the orthodoxy.
The problem I have is that if I say something that sounds positive about the Sequences, that’s going to turn my friends off, since they already know I think well of them.
I do not understand this. What planet are your friends from? If you’re tweeting to your friends, and they already know what you think of the Sequences, why are you tweeting about them to them?
They are from Earth. Because it would be great for me and for the world if more of my friends took an interest in this sort of thing, and if they have misconceptions that stand in the way of that I’d like to clear up those misconceptions.
Because it would be great for me and for the world if more of my friends took an interest in this sort of thing, and if they have misconceptions that stand in the way of that I’d like to clear up those misconceptions.
I understand the goal; but not the action taken to achieve it. Negging the Sequences will get them to take more of an interest?
I agree that Luke’s post might cause some people to update too much in the direction of “the Sequences aren’t original”. He was wrong or overstated things in the couple of bullet points that I checked out (and pointed out in my earlier comment). He probably should have showed it to you for error-checking and making sure it’s being fair before posting it.
I do think having an index of related works is very valuable, for people wanting to do further readings, or figuring out exactly which parts of the Sequences are original.
So they won’t actually read the literature and find out for themselves that it’s not what they’ve already read.
I read Spohn right away, and I’m at least planning to read some of the other references. But I’m not sure how typical I am in this regard.
I do think having an index of related works is very valuable, for people wanting to do further readings, or figuring out exactly which parts of the Sequences are original.
The reader really shouldn’t have to figure it out; it’s a bit intellectually dishonest to impose that burden on the reader—to the author’s reputational benefit.
In general, Eliezer did a fairly good job of citing things that he actually was drawing from, ie he didn’t plagiarize often. Much of LukeProg’s post was simply providing references to similar or independently invented ideas in academia, which were not directly relevant and would have been somewhat inappropriate to put in the posts.
There’s literature out there which is written in the same spirit as LW, but with different content. Now that’s an exciting message. It might even get people to read things.
Maybe we can start to build up a repository of those things, too. So far, you’ve recommended:
Language in Thought and Action
Psychological Foundations of Culture
Good and Real
Rational Choice in an Uncertain World
Unfortunately, those works seem incredibly different to me, so it’s hard for me to guess which other works you would also endorse as being in the “LW spirit.” I’ll try anyway:
Written by a psychologist-philosopher (literally), it reads exactly like a Sequence on five-second approaches to a wide array of thinking errors, carefully cataloged and taxonomized with the information needed to get out of them… and most of them are not thinking errors that have previously been cataloged on LW.
(Even what we commonly refer to here under the heading of “sunk-cost fallacy” is given a much more rigorous, “five-second level” analysis, showing how we get stuck in that fallacy all day long doing ordinary things. Forget sticking with a big multi-year project, he shows how we can get skewered by this fallacy in doing things that take five minutes.)
There’s a spirit in LW which really is a spirit that exists in many other places,
Yes, and pointing out those other places here serves two purposes.
It serves to brand LW, so that people passing by can quickly see the kind of spirit here. Yes, there’s a whole world out there, and many of us have spent some time in it, so seeing references to that world here serves to quickly communicate some of what LW is about.
References also server to point people here to other expositions of similar material.
For example, you say:
The only real way for people to learn better is to go out and read Language in Thought and Action
I’d recommend people at some point move on from Hayakawa to Korzybski, Science and Sanity, and the whole General Semantics literature. People have spent decades discussing these issues and organizing
It doesn’t get people to read the literature. Why should they? From what they can see, it’s already been presented to them on LW, after all.
That’s not my reaction to references. When I first came here, the references to Jaynes didn’t make me think “I’ve already covered this stuff, no need to read this web site.” On the contrary, it made me want to read more. Similarly, seeing a reference to other work associated with a sequence wouldn’t make me think “no need to bother reading that, EY has already regurgitated it for me”, it would make me want to read the original.
Yes, there’s a whole world out there, making it easier to navigate that world with links is a good thing.
TDT doesn’t artifically sever decision nodes from anything upstream; the idea is that observing your algorithm, but not its output, is supposed to screen off things upstream.
Pardon me; I’m not yet much of an expert with LW decision theories. When you explained TDT on the whiteboard to Alex (with me listening), you kept talking about “severing” rather than “screening off.” I’ll try to find a way to modify the OP.
ETA: I remembered I have a recording of that tutorial, and I when checked the recording, and it turns out my memory was wrong. You did talk about how TDT “screened off” the information whereas CDT “severs” the causal diagram.
I don’t understand what the purpose of this post was supposed to be—what positive consequence it was supposed to have.
I took the post to be Luke writing notes to himself, in public so as to recruit others’ help, toward the kind of bibliography that might be included in an academically acceptable version of the Sequences, or of some parts of them.
The intention being, I gathered, to publish these bibliographies as an adjunct to the Sequences—perhaps in the “wall of references” style of Luke’s early posts. (If so, I hope a more user-friendly way of displaying those is worked out first!)
(ETA: the specific positive consequence of that would be to help the reader “find the related works in academia” as per Luke’s third numbered point in the OP.)
I’m stating what I discerned of the intention—I won’t presume to judge the OP either as a plan of action, or as a first step in its execution.
Completely agree with your latter addendum that people should read Hofstadter, Hayakawa etc. not as footnotes to your work but for their own merits. Hofstadter I discovered in childhood and I wouldn’t be the same person if I hadn’t; I read Hayakawa on your recommendation, and am glad I did. Yay to more discussion of works that have the LW-nature, but are not otherwise alluded to in the Sequences. :)
Thankyou for clearing that up. Given your occupational affiliation with Luke I had been overestimating the extent to which you would endorse his position. That is, I wouldn’t have expected Luke to write this without checking with you first so thought you must have agreed.
Regardless of whether it’s original, you’re the one making rationality popular. Inspiring this many people to take more interest in rationality is a profoundly worthwhile accomplishment. The world needs teachers who can motivate them to think more clearly. I’m heartened to see your progress.
The only real way for people to learn better is to go out and read Language in Thought and Action or Rational Choice in an Uncertain World.
Added to my list!
Do you have any more reading suggestions for people who have read the sequences? I read a few books recommended in the book recommendation open threads (or on irc), but was sometimes disappointed (“Thinking in Systems” is not very rigorous and formal, Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” takes too much liberty interpreting various concepts, and I’m not a fan of books that start by telling me “don’t worry I won’t hurt your little brain with equations”).
And lo, people began tweeting:
Which is false. This pushes as far in the opposite wrong direction as the viewpoint it means to criticize.
Evolutionary biology, the non-epistemological part of the exposition of quantum mechanics, and of course heuristics and biases, are all not original. They don’t look deceptively original either; they cite or attributed-quote the sources from which they’re taken. I have yet to encounter anyone who thinks the Sequences are more original than they are.
When it comes to the part that isn’t reporting on standard science, the parts that are mostly dealt with by modern “philosophers” rather than experimental scientists of one kind or another, the OP is vastly overstating how much of the Sequences are similar to the standard stuff out there. There is such a vast variety of philosophy that you can often find a conclusion similar to anything, to around the same degree that Leibniz’s monadology anticipated timeless quantum mechanics, i.e., not very much. The motivations, the arguments by which things are pinned down, the exact form of the conclusions, and what is done with those conclusions, is most of the substance—finding a conclusion that happens to look vaguely similar does not mean that I was reporting someone else’s academic work and failing to cite it, or reinventing work that had already been done. It is not understating any sort of “close agreement” with even those particular concluders, let alone the field as a whole within which those are small isolated voices. Hofstadter’s superrationality is an acknowledged informal forerunner of TDT. But finding other people who think you ought to cooperate in the PD, but can’t quite formalize why, is not the same as TDT being preinvented. (Also TDT doesn’t artifically sever decision nodes from anything upstream; the idea is that observing your algorithm, but not its output, is supposed to screen off things upstream. This is “similar” to some attempts to rescue evidential decision theory by e.g. Eels, but not quite the same thing when it comes to important details like not two-boxing on Newcomb’s Problem.) And claiming that in principle philosophical intuitions arise within the brain is not the same as performing any particular dissolution of a confused question, or even the general methodology of dissolution as practiced and described by Yudkowsky or Drescher (who actually does agree and demonstrate the method in detail within “Good and Real”).
I’m also still not sure that Luke quite understands what the metaethics sequence is trying to say, but then I consider that sequence to have basically failed at exposition anyway. Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can point Luke or anyone else at which says the same thing in more academic language.
Several of these citations are from after the originals were written! Why not (falsely) claim that academia is just agreeing with the Sequences, instead?
I don’t understand what the purpose of this post was supposed to be—what positive consequence it was supposed to have. Lots of the Sequences are better exposition of existing ideas about evolutionary biology or cognitive biases or probability theory or whatever, which are appropriately quoted or cited within them? Yes, they are. People introducing Less Wrong should try to refer to those sources as much as possible when it comes to things like heuristics and biases, rather than talking like Eliezer Yudkowsky somehow invented the idea of scope insensitivity, so that they don’t sound like phyg victims? Double yes. But writing something that predictably causes some readers to get the impression that ideas presented within the Sequences are just redoing the work of other academics, so that they predictably tweet,
...I do not think the creation of this misunderstanding benefits anyone. It is also a grave sin to make it sound like you’re speaking for a standard academic position when you’re not!
And I think Luke is being extremely charitable in his construal of what’s “already” been done in academia. If some future anti-Luke is this charitable in construing how much of future work in epistemology and decision theory was “really” all done within the Sequences back in 2008, they will claim that everything was just invented by Eliezer Yudkowsky way back then—and they will be wrong—and I hope somebody argues with that anti-Luke too, and doesn’t let any good feeling for ol E. Y. stand in their way, just like we shouldn’t be prejudiced here by wanting to affiliate with academia or something.
I get what this is trying to do. There’s a spirit in LW which really is a spirit that exists in many other places, you can get it from Feynman, Hofstadter, the better class of science fiction, Tooby and Cosmides, many beautiful papers that were truly written to explain things as simply as possible, the same place I got it. (Interesting side note: John Tooby is apparently an SF fan who grew up reading van Vogt and Null-A, so he got some of his spirit from the same sources I did! There really is an ancient and honorable tradition out there.) If someone encounters that spirit in LW for the first time, they’ll think I invented it. Which I most certainly did not. If LW is your first introduction to these things, then you really aren’t going to know how much of the spirit I learned from the anncient masters… because just reading a citation, or even a paragraph-long quote, isn’t going to convey that at all. The only real way for people to learn better is to go out and read Language in Thought and Action or The Psychological Foundations of Culture. Doing this, I would guess, gave Luke an epiphany he’s trying to share—there’s a whole world out there, not just LW the way I first thought. But the OP doesn’t do that. It doesn’t get people to read the literature. Why should they? From what they can see, it’s already been presented to them on LW, after all. So they won’t actually read the literature and find out for themselves that it’s not what they’ve already read.
There’s literature out there which is written in the same spirit as LW, but with different content. Now that’s an exciting message. It might even get people to read things.
Do you have a Greasemonkey script that rips all the qualifying words out of my post, or something? I said things like:
“Eliezer’s posts on evolution mostly cover material you can find in any good evolutionary biology textbook”
“much of the Quantum Physics sequence can be found in quantum physics textbooks”
“Eliezer’s metaethics sequences includes dozens of lemmas previously discussed by philosophers”
“Eliezer’s free will mini-sequence includes coverage of topics not usually mentioned when philosophers discuss free will (e.g. Judea Pearl’s work on causality), but the conclusion is standard compatibilism.”
“[Eliezer’s posts] suggest that many philosophical problems can be dissolved into inquiries into the cognitive mechanisms that produce them, as also discussed in”
“[Eliezer’s posts] make the point that value is complex, a topic explored in more detail in...”
Your comment above seems to be reacting to a different post that I didn’t write, one that includes (false) claims like: “The motivations, the arguments by which things are pinned down, the exact form of the conclusions are mostly the same between The Sequences and previous work in mainstream academia.”
Really? This is the default reaction I encounter. Notice that when the user ‘Thomas’ below tried to name just two things he thought were original with you, he got both of them wrong.
Here’s a report of my experiences:
People have been talking about TDT for years but nobody seems to have noticed Spohn until HamletHenna and I independently stumbled on him this summer.
I do find it hard to interpret the metaethics sequence, so I’m not sure I grok everything you’re trying to say there. Maybe you can explain it to me sometime. In any case, when it comes to the pieces of it that can be found elsewhere, I almost never encounter anyone who knows their earlier counterparts in (e.g.) Railton & Jackson — unless I’m speaking to someone who has studied metaethics before, like Carl.
A sizable minority of people I talk to about dissolving questions are familiar with the logical positivists, but almost none of them are familiar with the recent cogsci-informed stuff, like Shafir (1998) or Talbot (2009).
As I recall, Less Wrong had never mentioned the field of “Bayesian epistemology” until my first post, The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship.
Here’s a specific story. I once told Anna that once I read about intelligence explosion I understood right away that it would be disastrous by default, because human values are incredibly complex. She seemed surprised and a bit suspicious and said “Why, had you read Joshua Greene?” I said “Sure, but he’s just one tip of a very large iceberg of philosophical and scientific work demonstrating the complexity of value. I was convinced of the complexity of value long ago by metaethics and moral psychology in general.”
Let’s look at them more closely:
Lots of cited textbooks were written after the Sequences, because I wanted to point people to up-to-date sources, but of course they mostly summarize results that are a decade old or older. This includes books like Glimcher (2010) and Dolan & Sharot (2011).
Batson (2011) is a summary of Batson’s life’s work on altruism in humans, almost all of which was published prior to the Sequences.
Spohn (2012) is just an update to Spohn’s pre-Sequences on work on his TDT-ish decision theory, included for completeness.
Talbot (2009) is the only one I see that is almost entirely composed of content that originates after the Sequences, and it too was included for completeness immediately after another work written before the Sequences: Sharif (1998).
That’s too bad, since I answered this question at the top of the post. I am trying to counteract these three effects:
Some readers will mistakenly think that common Less Wrong views are more parochial than they really are.
Some readers will mistakenly think Eliezer’s Sequences are more original than they really are.
If readers want to know more about the topic of a given article, it will be more difficult for them to find the related works in academia than if those works had been cited in Eliezer’s article.
I find problem #1 to be very common, and a contributor to the harmful, false, and popular idea that Less Wrong is a phyg. I’ve been in many conversations in which (1) someone starts out talking as though Less Wrong views are parochial and weird, and then (2) I explain the mainstream work behind or similar to every point they raise as parochial and weird, and then (3) after this happens 5 times in a row they seem kind of embarrassed and try to pretend like they never said things suggesting that Less Wrong views are parochial and weird, and ask me to email them some non-LW works on these subjects.
Problem #2 is common (see the first part of this comment), and seems to lead to phygish hero worship, as has been pointed out before.
Problem #3, I should think, is uncontroversial. Many of your posts have citations to related work, most of them do not (as is standard practice in the blogosphere), and like I said I don’t think it would have been a good idea for you to spend time digging up citations instead of writing the next blog post.
Predictable misunderstandings are the default outcome of almost anything 100+ people read. There’s always a trade-off between maximal clarity, readability, and other factors. But, I’m happy to tweak my original post to try to counteract this specific misunderstanding. I’ve added the line: “(edit: probably most of their content is original)”.
Remember that I came to LW with a philosophy and cogsci (especially rationality) background, and had been blogging about biases and metaethics and probability theory and so on at CommonSenseAtheism.com for years prior to encountering LW.
That is definitely not the spirit of my post. If you’ll recall, I once told you that if all human writing were about to be destroyed except for one book of our choosing, I’d go with The Sequences. You can’t get the kind of thing that CFAR is doing solely from Feynman, Kahneman, Stanovich, etc. And you can’t get FAI solely from Good, Minsky, and Wallach — not even close. Again, I get the sense you’re reacting to a post with different phrasing than the one I actually wrote.
Most people won’t read the literature either you or I link to. But many people will, like Wei Dai.
Case in point: Remember Benja’s recent post on UDT that you praised as “Original scientific research on saving the world”? Benja himself wrote that the idea for that post clicked for him as a result of reading one of the papers on logical uncertainty I linked to from So You Want to Save the World.
Most people won’t read my references. But some of those who do will go on to make a sizable difference as a result. And that is one of the reasons I cite so many related works, even if they’re not perfectly identical to the thing me or somebody else is doing.
FWIW, Luke’s rigorous citation of references has been absurdly useful to me when doing my research. It’s one of the aspects of reading LW that makes it worthwhile and productive.
Luke is already aware that I’ve utilized his citations to a great extent, but I wanted to publicly thank him for all that awesome work. I’d also like to thank others who have done similar things, such as Klevador. We need more of this.
I think a valid criticism can be made that while you were trying to counteract these three effects (which is clearly an important and useful effort), you didn’t take enough care to avoid introducing a new effect, of making some people think the Sequences are less original than they actually are. (For example you didn’t ask Eliezer to double check your descriptions of how the Sequences posts relate to the academic works, and you didn’t give some examples of where the Sequences are original.)
This is bad because in addition to communicating various ideas, the Sequences also serve as evidence of Eliezer’s philosophy and rationality talents/skills, which is useful for potential donors/supporters to judge the likely future effectiveness of the Singularity Institute in achieving its goals.
I agree I could have spent a paragraph reinforcing the originality of The Sequences.
As for asking Eliezer to check the article before posting: I’ve sent Eliezer things for feedback before, and he usually doesn’t give feedback on them until after I stop waiting and post them to LW. But as a result of this post, we’ve arranged a new heuristic: If I think Eliezer plausibly disagrees with a thing I’m going to post to LW, I’ll give him a chance to give feedback on it before I post it.
From a donor point of view, the question is as much whether Eliezer has made relevant lessons a true part of him as whether he has done original work.
The Sequences are neither necessary nor sufficient to get funding to do actual research (although I hope they are helpful in obtaining funding for research).
Yvain has posted more than once on this, although with less detail and referencing.
Oops, fixed. Thanks.
Though, note that the second Yvain post you linked to was a follow-up to one of my reference-packed posts on the subject.
All readers have a Greasemonkey script that rips all the qualifying words out of a post. This is a natural fact of writing and reading.
Not the post you wrote—the post that the long-time LWer who Twittered “Eliezer’s Yudkowsky’s Sequences are mostly not original” read. The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable—like you’re living in an authorial should-universe. Of course somebody’s going to read that post and think “Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences are mostly not original”! Of course that’s going to be the consequence of writing it! And maybe it’s just because I was reading it instead of writing it myself, without having all of your intentions so prominently in my mind, but I don’t see why on Earth you’d expect any other message to come across than that. A few qualifying words don’t have the kind of power it takes to stop that from happening!
Do you think most readers misinterpreted my post in that way? I doubt it. It looks to me like one person tweeted “Eliezer’s Sequences mostly not original” — a misinterpretation of my post which I’ve now explicitly denied near the top of the post.
My guess now would be that I probably underestimate the degree to which readers misinterpreted my post (because my own intentions were clear in my mind, illusion of transparency), and that you probably overestimate the degree to which readers misinterpreted my post (because you seem to have initially misinterpreted it, and that misinterpretation diminishes several years of cognitive work that you are justly proud of).
Also: you seem to be focusing on the one tweeted misinterpretation and not taking into account that we have evidence that the post is also achieving its explicitly stated goals, as evidenced by many of the comments on this thread: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
It is very easy to read the sequences and think that you think the philosophical thought is original to you. Other than the FAI stuff and decision theory stuff, is that true?
What exactly is wrong with being thought of as a very high-end popularizer? That material is incredibly well presented.
Additionally, people who disagree with your philosophical positions ought not be put in the (EDIT: position) of needing to reinvent the philosophical wheel to engage critically with your essays.
Put in the position of?
Yes, thanks.
I’d take out the EDIT—people can see from the comment below that you edited in response to a comment.
I don’t. In fact, I sometimes insert such words.
Only a single conclusion is possible: LukeProg is a TRAITOR!
I can understand why this would be negatively received by some—it is clearly hyperbole with a degree of silliness involved. That said—and possibly coincidentally—there is a serious point here. In fact it is the most salient point I noticed when reading the post and initial responses.
In most social hierarchies this post would be seen as a betrayal. An unusually overt and public political move against Eliezer. Not necessarily treason, betrayal of the tribe, it is a move against a rival. Of course it would certainly be in the interest of the targeted rival to try to portray the move as treason (or heresy, or whatever other kind of betrayal of the tribe rather than mere personal conflict.)
The above consideration is why I initially expected Eliezer to agree to a larger extent than he did (which evidently wasn’t very much!) Before making public statements of a highly status sensitive nature regarding an ally the typical political actor will make sure they aren’t offending them—they don’t take the small risk establishing an active rivalry unless they are certain the payoffs are worth it.
This (definitely!) isn’t to say that any of the above applies to this situation. Rationalists are weird and in particular can have an unusual relationship between their intellectual and political expression. ie. They sometimes go around saying what they think.
The thought that Luke was trying to sabotage my position, consciously or unconsciously, honestly never crossed my mind until I read this comment. Having now considered the hypothesis rather briefly, I assign it a rather low probability. Luke’s not like that.
It is perhaps worth noting that wedrifid didn’t say anything about motives (conscious or otherwise).
Whether I believe someone is trying to sabotage my position (consciously or unconsciously) is a different question from whether I believe they are making a move against me in a shared social hierarchy. (Although each is evidence for the other, of course.)
With both your comment here and your comments on the troll-fee issue I’ve found you coming across as arrogant. This perception seems to roughly match the response that other people have had to those comments as well, since most people disagreed with you in both areas (judging by number of upvotes). I hadn’t perceived you that way before now, so I’m wondering if something happened to you recently that’s altered the way you post or the way you think. This change is for the worse; I want my old model of Eliezer Yudkowsky back!
Frankly, I have found the sequences to be primarily useful for condensing concepts that I already had inside my head. The ideas expressed in almost all of the sequences are blatantly obvious, but they come across as catchy and often are reducible to a quick phrase. Their value lies in the fact that they make it easy to internalize certain ideas so that they’re more readily accessible to me. They also helped clarify the boundaries of some concepts, to a certain extent. The sequences have provided me with a useful terminology, but I don’t think they’ve offered me much else.
What ideas do you believe to be original that you’ve produced?
Is there a reason that defending the originality of the sequences is so important to you?
You only got this now?
While it wasn’t perfectly phrased, I understand where chaosmosis is coming from: I too get the sense that Eliezer is responding significantly less well to criticism, both by misinterpreting or straw-manning what other people have written and letting negative emotions influence what he writes. However, I don’t think that one draw a line through two data points: after all, what I regard as Eliezer’s best response to criticism, Reply to Holden on ‘Tool AI’, was written well after the Sequences.
“Is there a reason that defending the originality of the sequences is so important to you?”
Yudkowsky may need to begin reviewing the literature on cognitive biases for his own sake at this point.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is the supreme being to whom it is up to all of us to become superior!
I think chaosmosis would prefer to perceive this as occurring through a change in chaosmosis than a change in chaosmosis’s evidence about Eliezer.
No preference.
I don’t understand how your comment is responsive to atorm’s though, so I might be missing something here.
It responds to the disconnect between the quote and the quoted quote, in particular the implication of the latter regarding the former.
One anecdote given the ‘PR’ worries raised:
I have never read the sequences. After reading Luke’s post, I am much less likely to: the impression given is the sequences are generally idiosyncratic takes which recapitulate an already existing and better organized literature. I also think it is more likely the sequences are overrated, either through readers being unaware their (or similar) insights have already been made, or lacking the technical background to critique them.
It also downgraded my estimate of the value of EY’s work. Although I was pretty sceptical, I knew there was at least some chance that the sequences really were bursting with new insights and that LW really was streets ahead of mainstream academia. This now seems much less likely—although I don’t think EY is a plagiarist, it seems most of the sequences aren’t breaking new ground, but summarizing/unwittingly recapitulating insights that have already been made and taken further elsewhere.
So I can see the motivation for EY to defend that their originality: his stock goes down if the sequences are neat summaries but nothing that new rather than bursting with new and important insights, and EY’s stock is important for things like donations, public perception of him and the SI, etc. (Both my likelihood of donating and my regard for SI has been lowered a bit by this post and comments). However, EY’s way of responding to (weakly implied) criticism with catty arrogance compounds the harm.
If you are at all interested in rationality it would be a huge shame for you to skip the Sequences.
Yes, a lot of the material in the Sequences could also be obtained by reading very very carefully a few hundred impenetrable scholarly books that most people have never heard of in five or ten different disciplines, supplemented by a few journal articles, plus some additional insights by “reading between the lines”, plus drawing all the necessary connections between them. But you will not do this.
The Sequences condense all that information, put it in a really fun, really fascinating format, and transfer all of it into the deepest levels of your brain in a way that those hundred books wouldn’t. And then there’s some really valuable new material. Luke and Eliezer can argue whether the new material is 30% of the Sequences or 60% of the Sequences, but either number is still way more output than most people will produce over their entire lives.
If your worry is that they will just be recapitulating things you already know, I am pretty doubtful; I don’t know your exact knowledge level, but they were pretty exciting for me when I first read them and I had college degrees in philosophy and psychology which are pretty much the subjects covered. And if they are new to you, then from a “whether you should read them” point of view it doesn’t matter if Eliezer copied them verbatim off Wikipedia.
Seriously. Read the Sequences. Luke, who is the one arguing against their originality above, says that they are the one book he would like to save if there was an apocalypse. I would have to think a long time before saying the same but they’re certainly up there.
Also, as a fellow doctor interested in utiltiarianism/efficient charity, I enjoyed your blog and associated links.
For the record, when I read Eliezer’s comments about the originality of The Sequences, it sounds to me like he and I have pretty much the same estimate of how original The Sequences are.
Fair enough. Your and Luke’s recommendation are enough for me to read at least some to see if I have got the wrong impression.
You might want to link to “Yes, a blog” by Academian.
The sequences need a summary like the one you just wrote, the way books have a summary on the cover. Maybe this should be taken as a hint that you’d get more mileage out of the sequences with a really good description placed prominently in front of them. That could quickly re-frame non-originality claims as being irrelevant by plainly stating that they’re an accessible and entertaining way to learn about logic and bias (implying that the presentation is valuable even if some of the content can be found elsewhere), with (whatever amount) of new content on X, Y, Z topics. If you choose to write such a description, I’d really like to know what you got out of them that your philosophy and psychology degrees didn’t give you.
The sequences need a second edition. It’s sheer hubris to think that nothing has changed in four years.
There would be room for improvement even without anything changing. They were produced as daily blog posts for the purpose of forcing Eliezer to get his thoughts down on a page.
Actually I think the sequences are worth reading even though I deplore the tub-thumping, lack of informedness, etc.
What would you expect if someone bright but uninformed about philosophy invented their own philosophy?
Lots of ground re-covered. Lots of avoidable errors. Some novel insights.
I hadn’t expected you to disagree with that tweet, so I’m clearly getting something wrong. I wrote that in the hope that it would encourage people to read the Sequences, not put them off—I think people imagine it as this million-word work of revelation, but a very large part of what it is is a work of popular science—turning people on to good existing ideas in psychology and philosophy and biology and physics and suchlike. There is a great deal that is original and valuable in there, but I don’t think of it as the majority of the material.
I get your point, but to lots of people the wording of that tweet would have the connotation ‘EY is a plagiarist’, not ‘EY is not a crackpot’.
Yes, this.
The word “original” has positive connotations. And therefore the words “unoriginal” or “not original” have negative connotations.
So, yeah, I don’t think you’d encourage anyone to read anything by calling it “not original”.
Except on Wikipedia (where it’s usually an euphemism for ‘crackpottish’). ;-)
(As someone on a Wikipedia talk page once said—quoting from memory, “if we aren’t allowed to [do X] the allowed band between original research and plagiarism becomes dangerously narrow”.)
Right, but I had hoped that the result would be that someone would follow the link in the tweet, after which they find out some things that may cause them to feel more positively.
I don’t know anything about the friends ciphergoth is attempting to reach, but I observe that in religion, “original” would be the greater turn-off. In religion, every innovation is heretical, because it is an innovation. To be accepted it must be presented as “not original”, either because it is exactly in accordance with official doctrine, or because it is a return to the true religion that the official doctrine has departed from. It is rare for a religion to successfully introduce a new prophet with the power to sweep away the old, and even then (“I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil”) the pretence is maintained that no such thing has happened.
Someone who doesn’t want to read science-y stuff because they have that kind of mindset is not going to suddenly become curious when someone tells them it’s based on science-y stuff from less than 30 years ago.
I like to think of it temporally; that religion is much like rationalists facing the wrong direction. Both occasionally look over their shoulders to confirm their beliefs (although with theists it’s more like throwing a homunculus into the distant past and using that for eyes), while most of the time the things we really care about and find exciting are in front of us. Original vs unoriginal with respect to modern thought is of no practical interest to someone with the “every innovation is heretical” mindset unless it is completely within their usual line of sight—heretical is code for “I don’t want to keep looking over my shoulder”, not “I hate the original on principle”. So unless you put that “original” encouragement thousands of years ago where they can see it, where it’s a matter of one in front and one behind, the distinction between which is the greater turn-off is not going to matter, or bait anyone into turning around—there is nothing in their usually observed world to relate it to.
Thinking about it further though, this makes something of a nonsense of the original tweet, since it’s hard to think what would count as “mostly original” by this standard. You might as well describe eg The Better Angels of Our Nature as “mostly not original” since it contains no original research but presents a synthesis of the research of others, building up to a common theme.
The problem I have is that if I say something that sounds positive about the Sequences, that’s going to turn my friends off, since they already know I think well of them. By saying something that on first reading sounds negative, I might get their interest, but that only works if they go on to follow the link.
For example, they may be turned off if you came out and said “The sequences really aren’t the parochial ramblings of an intellectual outcast, they are totally in accord with mainstream scientific thinking”. But “mostly not original” conveys much of the same message by making a concession to the orthodoxy.
I do not understand this. What planet are your friends from? If you’re tweeting to your friends, and they already know what you think of the Sequences, why are you tweeting about them to them?
They are from Earth. Because it would be great for me and for the world if more of my friends took an interest in this sort of thing, and if they have misconceptions that stand in the way of that I’d like to clear up those misconceptions.
I understand the goal; but not the action taken to achieve it. Negging the Sequences will get them to take more of an interest?
I agree that Luke’s post might cause some people to update too much in the direction of “the Sequences aren’t original”. He was wrong or overstated things in the couple of bullet points that I checked out (and pointed out in my earlier comment). He probably should have showed it to you for error-checking and making sure it’s being fair before posting it.
I do think having an index of related works is very valuable, for people wanting to do further readings, or figuring out exactly which parts of the Sequences are original.
I read Spohn right away, and I’m at least planning to read some of the other references. But I’m not sure how typical I am in this regard.
The reader really shouldn’t have to figure it out; it’s a bit intellectually dishonest to impose that burden on the reader—to the author’s reputational benefit.
In general, Eliezer did a fairly good job of citing things that he actually was drawing from, ie he didn’t plagiarize often. Much of LukeProg’s post was simply providing references to similar or independently invented ideas in academia, which were not directly relevant and would have been somewhat inappropriate to put in the posts.
Maybe we can start to build up a repository of those things, too. So far, you’ve recommended:
Language in Thought and Action
Psychological Foundations of Culture
Good and Real
Rational Choice in an Uncertain World
Unfortunately, those works seem incredibly different to me, so it’s hard for me to guess which other works you would also endorse as being in the “LW spirit.” I’ll try anyway:
Many of the readings for Aaronson’s class Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science
Several works by Paul Almond
Much of Overcoming Bias
Several blogs of other LWers, e.g. Yvain’s blog
How about:
Mental Traps
Written by a psychologist-philosopher (literally), it reads exactly like a Sequence on five-second approaches to a wide array of thinking errors, carefully cataloged and taxonomized with the information needed to get out of them… and most of them are not thinking errors that have previously been cataloged on LW.
(Even what we commonly refer to here under the heading of “sunk-cost fallacy” is given a much more rigorous, “five-second level” analysis, showing how we get stuck in that fallacy all day long doing ordinary things. Forget sticking with a big multi-year project, he shows how we can get skewered by this fallacy in doing things that take five minutes.)
There should be more (literal) philosopher-psychologists.
Several essays by Paul Graham. (eg Keep Your Identity Small or How to Disagree)
Yes, and pointing out those other places here serves two purposes.
It serves to brand LW, so that people passing by can quickly see the kind of spirit here. Yes, there’s a whole world out there, and many of us have spent some time in it, so seeing references to that world here serves to quickly communicate some of what LW is about.
References also server to point people here to other expositions of similar material.
For example, you say:
I’d recommend people at some point move on from Hayakawa to Korzybski, Science and Sanity, and the whole General Semantics literature. People have spent decades discussing these issues and organizing
That’s not my reaction to references. When I first came here, the references to Jaynes didn’t make me think “I’ve already covered this stuff, no need to read this web site.” On the contrary, it made me want to read more. Similarly, seeing a reference to other work associated with a sequence wouldn’t make me think “no need to bother reading that, EY has already regurgitated it for me”, it would make me want to read the original.
Yes, there’s a whole world out there, making it easier to navigate that world with links is a good thing.
Pardon me; I’m not yet much of an expert with LW decision theories. When you explained TDT on the whiteboard to Alex (with me listening), you kept talking about “severing” rather than “screening off.” I’ll try to find a way to modify the OP.
ETA: I remembered I have a recording of that tutorial, and I when checked the recording, and it turns out my memory was wrong. You did talk about how TDT “screened off” the information whereas CDT “severs” the causal diagram.
I took the post to be Luke writing notes to himself, in public so as to recruit others’ help, toward the kind of bibliography that might be included in an academically acceptable version of the Sequences, or of some parts of them.
The intention being, I gathered, to publish these bibliographies as an adjunct to the Sequences—perhaps in the “wall of references” style of Luke’s early posts. (If so, I hope a more user-friendly way of displaying those is worked out first!)
(ETA: the specific positive consequence of that would be to help the reader “find the related works in academia” as per Luke’s third numbered point in the OP.)
Why would that actually be a consequence of the OP as written?
I’m stating what I discerned of the intention—I won’t presume to judge the OP either as a plan of action, or as a first step in its execution.
Completely agree with your latter addendum that people should read Hofstadter, Hayakawa etc. not as footnotes to your work but for their own merits. Hofstadter I discovered in childhood and I wouldn’t be the same person if I hadn’t; I read Hayakawa on your recommendation, and am glad I did. Yay to more discussion of works that have the LW-nature, but are not otherwise alluded to in the Sequences. :)
Thankyou for clearing that up. Given your occupational affiliation with Luke I had been overestimating the extent to which you would endorse his position. That is, I wouldn’t have expected Luke to write this without checking with you first so thought you must have agreed.
Regardless of whether it’s original, you’re the one making rationality popular. Inspiring this many people to take more interest in rationality is a profoundly worthwhile accomplishment. The world needs teachers who can motivate them to think more clearly. I’m heartened to see your progress.
Added to my list!
Do you have any more reading suggestions for people who have read the sequences? I read a few books recommended in the book recommendation open threads (or on irc), but was sometimes disappointed (“Thinking in Systems” is not very rigorous and formal, Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” takes too much liberty interpreting various concepts, and I’m not a fan of books that start by telling me “don’t worry I won’t hurt your little brain with equations”).
Great minds think alike?