If you look at the top 10-20 or so post, as well as a bunch of niche posts about machine learning and AI, you’ll see the sort of discussion we tend to have best on LessWrong. I don’t come here to get ‘life-improvements’ or ‘self-help’, I come here much more to be part of a small intellectual community that’s very curious about human rationality.
I wanted to follow up on this a bit.
TLDR: While LessWrong readers tangentially care a lot about self-improvement, reading forums alone likely won’t have a big effect on life success. But that’s not really that relevant; the most relevant thing to look at is how much progress the community have done on the technical mathematical and philosophical questions it has focused most on. Unfortunately, that discussion is very hard to have without spending a lot of time doing actual maths and philosophy (though if you wanted to do that, I’m sure there are people who would be really happy to discuss those things).
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If what you wanted to achieve was life-improvements, reading a forum seems like a confusing approach.
Things that I expect to work better are:
personally tailored 1-on-1 advice (e.g. seeing a sleep psychologist, a therapist, a personal trainer or a life coach)
working with great mentors or colleagues and learning from them
deliberate practice ― applying techniques for having more productive disagreements when you actually disagree with colleagues, implementing different productivity systems and seeing how well they work for you, regularly turning your beliefs into predictions and bets checking how well you’re actually reasoning
taking on projects that step the right distance beyond your comfort zone
just changing whatever part of your environment makes things bad for you (changing jobs, moving to another city, leaving a relationship, starting a relationship, changing your degree, buying a new desk chair, …)
There’s previously been some discussion here around whether being a LessWrong reader correlates which increased life success (see e.g. this and this).
As a community, the answer seems to be overwhelmingly positive. In the span of roughly a decade, people who combined ideas about how to reason under uncertainty with impartial altruistic values, and used those to conclude that it would be important to work on issues like AI alignment, have done some very impressive things (as judged by an outside perspective). They’ve launched billion dollar foundations, set up 30+ employee research institutes at some of the worlds most prestigious universities, and gotten endorsements from some of the world’s richest and most influential people, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. (NOTE: I’m going to caveat these claims below.)
The effects on individual readers are a more complex issue and the relevant variables are harder to measure. (Personally I think there will be some improvements in something like “the ability to think clearly about hard problems”, but that that will largely stem from readers of LessWrong already being selected for being the kinds of people who are good at that.)
Regardless, like Ben hints at, this partly seems like the wrong metric to focus on. This is the caveat.
While interested in self-improvement, one of the key things people at LessWrong have been trying to get at is reasoning safely about super intelligences. To take a problem that’s far in the future, where the stakes are potentially very high, where there is no established field of research, and where thinking about it can feel weird and disorienting… and still trying to do so in a way where you get to the truth.
So personally I think the biggest victories are some impressive technical progress in this domain. Like, a bunch of mathsandmuchconceptualphilosophy.
I believe this because I have my own thoughts about what seems important to work on and what kinds of thinking make progress on those problems. To share those with someone who haven’t spent much time around LessWrong could take many hours of conversation. And I think often they would remain unconvinced. It’s just hard to think and talk about complex issues in any domain. It would be similarly hard for me to understand why a biology PhD student thinks one theory is more important than another relying only on the merits of the theories, without any appeal to what other senior biologists think.
It’s a situation where to understand why I think this is important someone might need to do a lot of maths and philosophy… which they probably won’t do unless they already think it is important. I don’t know how to solve that chicken-egg problem (except for talking to people who were independently curious about that kind of stuff). But my not being able to solve it doesn’t change the fact that it’s there. And that I did spend hundreds of hours engaging with the relevant content and now do have detailed opinions about it.
So, to conclude… people on LessWrong are trying to make progress on AI and rationality, and one important perspective for thinking about LessWrong is whether people are actually making progress on AI and rationality. I’d encourage you (Jon) to engage with that perspective as an important lens through which to understand LessWrong.
Having said that, I want to note that I’m glad that you seem to want to engage in good faith with people from LessWrong, and I hope you’ll have some interesting conversations.
I wanted to follow up on this a bit.
TLDR: While LessWrong readers tangentially care a lot about self-improvement, reading forums alone likely won’t have a big effect on life success. But that’s not really that relevant; the most relevant thing to look at is how much progress the community have done on the technical mathematical and philosophical questions it has focused most on. Unfortunately, that discussion is very hard to have without spending a lot of time doing actual maths and philosophy (though if you wanted to do that, I’m sure there are people who would be really happy to discuss those things).
___
If what you wanted to achieve was life-improvements, reading a forum seems like a confusing approach.
Things that I expect to work better are:
personally tailored 1-on-1 advice (e.g. seeing a sleep psychologist, a therapist, a personal trainer or a life coach)
working with great mentors or colleagues and learning from them
deliberate practice ― applying techniques for having more productive disagreements when you actually disagree with colleagues, implementing different productivity systems and seeing how well they work for you, regularly turning your beliefs into predictions and bets checking how well you’re actually reasoning
taking on projects that step the right distance beyond your comfort zone
just changing whatever part of your environment makes things bad for you (changing jobs, moving to another city, leaving a relationship, starting a relationship, changing your degree, buying a new desk chair, …)
And even then, realistic expectations for self-improvement might be quite slow. (Though the magic comes when you manage to compound such slow improvements over a long time-period.)
There’s previously been some discussion here around whether being a LessWrong reader correlates which increased life success (see e.g. this and this).
As a community, the answer seems to be overwhelmingly positive. In the span of roughly a decade, people who combined ideas about how to reason under uncertainty with impartial altruistic values, and used those to conclude that it would be important to work on issues like AI alignment, have done some very impressive things (as judged by an outside perspective). They’ve launched billion dollar foundations, set up 30+ employee research institutes at some of the worlds most prestigious universities, and gotten endorsements from some of the world’s richest and most influential people, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. (NOTE: I’m going to caveat these claims below.)
The effects on individual readers are a more complex issue and the relevant variables are harder to measure. (Personally I think there will be some improvements in something like “the ability to think clearly about hard problems”, but that that will largely stem from readers of LessWrong already being selected for being the kinds of people who are good at that.)
Regardless, like Ben hints at, this partly seems like the wrong metric to focus on. This is the caveat.
While interested in self-improvement, one of the key things people at LessWrong have been trying to get at is reasoning safely about super intelligences. To take a problem that’s far in the future, where the stakes are potentially very high, where there is no established field of research, and where thinking about it can feel weird and disorienting… and still trying to do so in a way where you get to the truth.
So personally I think the biggest victories are some impressive technical progress in this domain. Like, a bunch of maths and much conceptual philosophy.
I believe this because I have my own thoughts about what seems important to work on and what kinds of thinking make progress on those problems. To share those with someone who haven’t spent much time around LessWrong could take many hours of conversation. And I think often they would remain unconvinced. It’s just hard to think and talk about complex issues in any domain. It would be similarly hard for me to understand why a biology PhD student thinks one theory is more important than another relying only on the merits of the theories, without any appeal to what other senior biologists think.
It’s a situation where to understand why I think this is important someone might need to do a lot of maths and philosophy… which they probably won’t do unless they already think it is important. I don’t know how to solve that chicken-egg problem (except for talking to people who were independently curious about that kind of stuff). But my not being able to solve it doesn’t change the fact that it’s there. And that I did spend hundreds of hours engaging with the relevant content and now do have detailed opinions about it.
So, to conclude… people on LessWrong are trying to make progress on AI and rationality, and one important perspective for thinking about LessWrong is whether people are actually making progress on AI and rationality. I’d encourage you (Jon) to engage with that perspective as an important lens through which to understand LessWrong.
Having said that, I want to note that I’m glad that you seem to want to engage in good faith with people from LessWrong, and I hope you’ll have some interesting conversations.