Half-formed musing: what’s the relationship between being a nerd and trusting high-level abstractions? In some sense they seem to be the opposite of each other—nerds focus obsessively on a domain until they understand it deeply, not just at high levels of abstraction. But if I were to give a very brief summary of the rationalist community, it might be: nerds who take very high-level abstractions (such as moloch, optimisation power, the future of humanity) very seriously.
It seems to me that the resolution to the apparent paradox is that nerds are interested in all the details of their domain, but the outcome that they tend to look for are high-level abstractions. Even in settings like fandoms, there is a big push towards massive theories that entails every little detail about the story.
Though defining rationalist community as a sort of community of meta-nerds who apply this nerd approach to almost anything doesn’t seem too off the mark.
I think you need to unpack “trust” and “take seriously” a little bit to make this assertion. I think nerds are generally (heh) more able to understand the lossiness of models, and to recognize that abstractions are more broadly applicable, but less powerful than specifics.
I wouldn’t say I trust or take seriously the idea of Moloch or the similarities between different optimization mechanisms. I do recognize that those models have a lot of explanatory and predictive power, especially as a head-start (aka “prior”) on domains where I haven’t done the work to understand the exceptions and specifics.
Half-formed musing: what’s the relationship between being a nerd and trusting high-level abstractions? In some sense they seem to be the opposite of each other—nerds focus obsessively on a domain until they understand it deeply, not just at high levels of abstraction. But if I were to give a very brief summary of the rationalist community, it might be: nerds who take very high-level abstractions (such as moloch, optimisation power, the future of humanity) very seriously.
It seems to me that the resolution to the apparent paradox is that nerds are interested in all the details of their domain, but the outcome that they tend to look for are high-level abstractions. Even in settings like fandoms, there is a big push towards massive theories that entails every little detail about the story.
Though defining rationalist community as a sort of community of meta-nerds who apply this nerd approach to almost anything doesn’t seem too off the mark.
I think you need to unpack “trust” and “take seriously” a little bit to make this assertion. I think nerds are generally (heh) more able to understand the lossiness of models, and to recognize that abstractions are more broadly applicable, but less powerful than specifics.
I wouldn’t say I trust or take seriously the idea of Moloch or the similarities between different optimization mechanisms. I do recognize that those models have a lot of explanatory and predictive power, especially as a head-start (aka “prior”) on domains where I haven’t done the work to understand the exceptions and specifics.