Stream of consciousness. Judge me that ye may be judged. If you judge it by first-level Less Wrong standards, it should be downvoted (vague unjustifiied assertions, thoughtlessly rude), but maybe the information is useful. I look first for the heavily downvoted posts and enjoy the responses to them best.
I found the discussion on dietary supplementation interesting, in your link and elsewhere. As I recall, the tendency was for the responses (not entrants, but peoples comments around town) to be both crazy and stupid (with many exceptions, e.g., Yvain, Xacharaiah). I recall another thread on the topic where the correct comment (“careful!”) was downvoted and its obvious explanation (“evolution works!”) offered afterward was upvoted. Since I detected no secondary reasons for this, it was interesting in implying Less Wrongians did not see the obvious. Low certainties attached since I know I know nothing about this place. I’m deliberately being vague.
In general, Less Wrongians strike me as a group of people of impaired instrumental rationality who are working to overcome it. Give or take, most of you seem to be smarter than average but also less trustworthy, less able to exhibit strong commitments, etc. Probably this has been written somewhere hereabouts, but a lot of irrationalities are hard to overcome local optima; have you really gone far enough onto the other side? Incidentally, that could be a definition for x-rationality (if never actually done): Actually epistemically rational enough that it’s instrumentally useful. Probably a brutally hard threshold to achieve and seems untrue of here, as I believe I’ve seen threads comment.
I was curious about the background of the people offering lessons at the rationality bootcamp, and saw some blog entry by one of them against, oh, being conservative in outlook (re: risk aversion). It was incredibly stupid; I mean, almost exclusively circular reasoning. You obviously deviate from the norm in your risk aversion. You’re not obviously more successful than the norm (or are you? perhaps I’m mistaken). Maybe it’s just a tough row to hoe, but that’s the real task.
Personal comment: I realize Dmitry has been criticized a bit elsewhere and the voting trend doesn’t support generalization to the community at large, but my conversation with him illustrates what I generally believe about this place. I knew more than he did. I said enough that he should realize this. He didn’t realize it and shoehorned his response into a boring framework. I had specific advice to give, which I didn’t get to, and realized I was reluctant to give (most Less Wrong stuff seems weak to me).
A whole lot of Less Wrong seems to be going for less detail, less knowledge, more use of frameworks of universal applicability and little precision. The sequences seem similar to me: Boring where I can judge meaning, meaningless where I can’t. And always too long. I’ve read about four paragraphs of them in total. The quality of conversation here is high for a blog, of course, but low for a good academic setting. Some of the mild sneering at academics around here sounds ridiculous (an AI researcher believes in God). AI’s a weak field. All round, papers don’t quite capture any field and are often way way behind what people roughly feel.
Real question: Do you want me here?
I like you guys. I agree with you philosophically. I have nothing much to offer unless I put some effort into it (e.g., actually read what people write, etc). No confusion: You should be downvoting posts like this in general. You might want to make an exception ’cause it’s worth hearing a particular rambling mindset once. My effort is better spent elsewhere (I can’t imagine you’d disagree). I can’t see anything that can be offered to me. I feel like I was more rational at age 7 than you are now (I wrote a pro and con list for castrating myself for the longevity and potential continuity of personality gains; e.g., maintaining the me of 7). A million other things. I’m working on real problems in other areas now.
A whole lot of Less Wrong seems to be going for less detail, less knowledge, more use of frameworks of universal applicability and little precision. The sequences seem similar to me: Boring where I can judge meaning, meaningless where I can’t. And always too long. I’ve read about four paragraphs of them in total. The quality of conversation here is high for a blog, of course, but low for a good academic setting. Some of the mild sneering at academics around here sounds ridiculous (an AI researcher believes in God). AI’s a weak field. All round, papers don’t quite capture any field and are often way way behind what people roughly feel.
This. A thousand times this. As a lawyer, LessWrong pattern matches with people outside a complicated field who are convinced that those in the fields are idiots because observers think that “the field is not that complicated.”
That said, “Boring where I can judge meaning, meaningless where I can’t.” is an unfair criticism. Lots of really excellent ideas seem boring if you had already internalized the core ideas.
Reminds me of part of a comment on Moldbug’s blot, by Nick Szabo:
[legal reasoning]
It’s a disciplined and competitive (dialectic, in the true original sense of that term) use of analogies, precedents, and emergent rules, far more sophisticated than normal use of analogy and metaphor. I learned it my first year of law school and it’s a radically different kind of thinking I had never encountered before in school. The Bayesian bloggers seem to be completely oblivious to it, and to the tremendous value of tradition generally. That makes them, from my POV, culturally illiterate and incompetent to opine on law or politics. Yes, legal training also made me stuck up. :-)
If you can’t afford law school, you can learn most of what you need to know from Legal Method and Writing by Charles R. Calleros and a first year law school common law casebook (Torts, Property, or Contracts).
The extremely short description of legal or scholastic reasoning is to think of a proposition or dispute as Schrodinger’s Cat, both true and false at the same time, or each party at fault or not at the same time, or the appropriate dichotomy. Then gather all the moral or legal disputes that are similar to this one. Argue by analogy for each side both from the facts of those prior disputes and from the informal rules (“holdings”) implied by the decisions resolving those disputes. This kind of reasoning allows a lawyer to anticipate an opponent’s as well as their own argument in a case, and allows a judge to appreciate both sides of an argument, the latter also crucial, but often absent, in reasoning in about politics, morals, and the more complex areas of science, which in absence of this kind of discipline is dominated by confirmation bias and lack of understanding of other points of view.
Law also has a sophisticated set of qualitative probabilities I’ve blogged on, which imply not just degrees of truth but various aspects of gathering evidence, burdens of proof, and so on. The scientific method derived in large part from the Continental law of evidence, with which Galileo, Leibniz, etc. were intimately familiar having studied law. But legal reasoning, or scholastic reasoning as it used to be known, is still capable of covering a far wider swath of the human experience than scientific reasoning which is really just a special case and applies well only to hard evidence or the hard sciences.
I’ve been studying the history of common law lately due to Nick’s influence, after which I’m gonna read the book he recommended. I notice that his description of legal reasoning is very similar to how I use my chess subskills for rationality.
The extremely short description of legal or scholastic reasoning is to think of a proposition or dispute as Schrodinger’s Cat, both true and false at the same time, or each party at fault or not at the same time, or the appropriate dichotomy. Then gather all the moral or legal disputes that are similar to this one. Argue by analogy for each side both from the facts of those prior disputes and from the informal rules (“holdings”) implied by the decisions resolving those disputes. This kind of reasoning allows a lawyer to anticipate an opponent’s as well as their own argument in a case, and allows a judge to appreciate both sides of an argument, the latter also crucial, but often absent, in reasoning in about politics, morals, and the more complex areas of science, which in absence of this kind of discipline is dominated by confirmation bias and lack of understanding of other points of view.
This is a moderately reasonable model of litigation, but it isn’t complete. For example, Thurgood Marshall litigated separate-but-equal in the law school context specifically because every judge has a gut feeling of how to compare law schools, which just isn’t true about other educational institutions. In law school, I heard the apocryphal story that the law for the State of Texas argued that the new segregated law school was just as good as UT Law School, and Justice Clark—a graduate of UT—passed a note to a colleague that read “Bullshit” That’s clever lawyering and has nothing to do with arguing from precedent.
Further, not all law is litigation. The legislature empowered to make new laws that have no relationship to old laws. In short, there’s a fair amount more to the practice of law than reasoning by analogy, even if reasoning by analogy is an important skill for a lawyer.
I like your style of writing. Though: too many ideas, difficult to rate and respond.
Karma always has a random component. Karma of one comment is not significant. Karma of 10 comments shows a trend. I have once received a negative karma for a comment showing an obvious error in reasoning of others; but it only happened once in maybe hundred comments, so I don’t make a drama of it. But yeah, it might be painful if that happened to someone’s first comment on LW.
Instrumental rationality is a known problem of intelligent people. My worst experience was Mensa: huge signalling, almost nothing ever done; and if something is done, it’s usually always done by the same two or three people, who could just as well have it done on their own. Compared with that, people at LW are relatively high in instrumental rationality—they have a working website, they write good articles, they do research, they organize meetups and seminars. But yes, we could do a lot better. Instead of going meta, people could focus and write about things they care about. Not doing this on a web discussion is probably a symptom of not doing it in the real life.
Yes, being convinced of one’s own rationality can lead to overconfidence. I don’t know a cure. Perhaps repeated exposure to disagreement of other rational people will eventually move one to update. Another reason for people focusing on what they are good at—providing more evidence for their rationalist friends.
Re: last three paragraphs—the choice to stay or leave is on you. Don’t participate in the discussions you consider worthless, write something about the real things you work on. (And perhaps I should do the same.) But this is not a new idea—we have regular threads “what are you working on” here.
Same dude here, despite the name. Hypothetical: Should a prof at, say, Harvard working on the genetics of longevity post and spend time here?
Discussing his own work would be identifying and probably not very productive. Let’s further say he’s pre-tenure. Top places have a very different tenure success rate than even very good places, so it’s an iffy point in his career.
Does Less Wrong have anything to offer him? And doesn’t he serve Less Wrong best by staying away and working? (or even “playing” elsewhere)
My central criticism of this place may well be that some of you won’t see there really is no question what the right answer is.
Incidentally, perfectly agree with your comment TimS, but the point is that I internalized those ideas independent of LessWrong. ViliamBur, you misunderstood my Karma point. I was merely acknowledging that my comment’s being upvoted and Dmitry’s downvoted means I can’t use it to indict the community at large (and instead was offering is as illustration of my mindset). Luke: yup. But I did skim through the papers from the institute. Not very good. I suspect I can mostly infer the sequences from very basic background knowledge in game theory, philosophy, physics, neuroscience, psych, etc, and reading current comments threads. I don’t see anything too fancy implied by the secondary sources (I enjoy reading the back-and-forth more).
Uh, what else. I enjoy HPMOR. What I like about it, however, is bad about me: Basically what Robin feared in his comment on OvercomingBias. I should (and will) go. It goes without saying that you wish me well. I just felt like saying hello because I like you. And if you can make it so I can talk to you profitably, I’d like that. Not your fault and I’m sorry to have said it, but I thought you should know.
You should reply to different commenters individually, since then it will send them each notifications that you’re replying. Few readers check all branches of the thread that they replied to.
Hypothetical: Should a prof at, say, Harvard working on the genetics of longevity post and spend time here? [...] Does Less Wrong have anything to offer him?
He could discuss the less crtitical parts of his work. If there is a meetup near his home, he could go there and try to find someone to cooperate with. Or if he is expert at genetics but less expert on math, he could ask someone to help him with statistics.
Also, he could just spend here his free time, if he prefers company of rational people and has problem finding it outside of his work.
And doesn’t he serve Less Wrong best by staying away and working?
That question is relevant for all of us, experts or not. Even for me there are many things I should be doing rather than procrastinating on LW. However, I know myself -- I spent a lot of time online, so given that, at least I can choose a site that gives me intelligent discussions.
If you spend your time better, keep doing what works for you. Maybe visiting LW once a month and reading the articles in the “Main” part would be a reasonable compromise, if you want to participate. (I don’t know if there is an RSS feed for “Main”.)
He could discuss the less crtitical parts of his work. If there is a meetup near his home, he could go there and try to find someone to cooperate with. Or if he is expert at genetics but less expert on math, he could ask someone to help him with statistics.
Suppose you were a professional researcher looking for statistical help. Would you (A) go to a LessWrong meetup, (B), give a talk at the Statistics department of your hypothetical university, or (C) ask your colleagues which statisticians or statistically-literate graduate students they have collaborated with recently?
I’m sure the LessWrong community believes in statistics, which is good. But I don’t believe the average member of this crowd is any better at the humdrum practicalities of statistical hypothesis testing than your average working scientist. I would guess LessWrong skews younger and less expert.
Also, he could just spend here his free time, if he prefers company of rational people and has problem finding it outside of his work.
You will not have a hard time finding smart rational people on the Harvard campus! Or, for that matter, near any major university.
I’m with twolier—LessWrong is fun, but I don’t see it being all that professionally valuable for people in most technical fields.
Stream of consciousness. Judge me that ye may be judged. If you judge it by first-level Less Wrong standards, it should be downvoted (vague unjustifiied assertions, thoughtlessly rude), but maybe the information is useful. I look first for the heavily downvoted posts and enjoy the responses to them best.
I found the discussion on dietary supplementation interesting, in your link and elsewhere. As I recall, the tendency was for the responses (not entrants, but peoples comments around town) to be both crazy and stupid (with many exceptions, e.g., Yvain, Xacharaiah). I recall another thread on the topic where the correct comment (“careful!”) was downvoted and its obvious explanation (“evolution works!”) offered afterward was upvoted. Since I detected no secondary reasons for this, it was interesting in implying Less Wrongians did not see the obvious. Low certainties attached since I know I know nothing about this place. I’m deliberately being vague.
In general, Less Wrongians strike me as a group of people of impaired instrumental rationality who are working to overcome it. Give or take, most of you seem to be smarter than average but also less trustworthy, less able to exhibit strong commitments, etc. Probably this has been written somewhere hereabouts, but a lot of irrationalities are hard to overcome local optima; have you really gone far enough onto the other side? Incidentally, that could be a definition for x-rationality (if never actually done): Actually epistemically rational enough that it’s instrumentally useful. Probably a brutally hard threshold to achieve and seems untrue of here, as I believe I’ve seen threads comment.
I was curious about the background of the people offering lessons at the rationality bootcamp, and saw some blog entry by one of them against, oh, being conservative in outlook (re: risk aversion). It was incredibly stupid; I mean, almost exclusively circular reasoning. You obviously deviate from the norm in your risk aversion. You’re not obviously more successful than the norm (or are you? perhaps I’m mistaken). Maybe it’s just a tough row to hoe, but that’s the real task.
Personal comment: I realize Dmitry has been criticized a bit elsewhere and the voting trend doesn’t support generalization to the community at large, but my conversation with him illustrates what I generally believe about this place. I knew more than he did. I said enough that he should realize this. He didn’t realize it and shoehorned his response into a boring framework. I had specific advice to give, which I didn’t get to, and realized I was reluctant to give (most Less Wrong stuff seems weak to me).
A whole lot of Less Wrong seems to be going for less detail, less knowledge, more use of frameworks of universal applicability and little precision. The sequences seem similar to me: Boring where I can judge meaning, meaningless where I can’t. And always too long. I’ve read about four paragraphs of them in total. The quality of conversation here is high for a blog, of course, but low for a good academic setting. Some of the mild sneering at academics around here sounds ridiculous (an AI researcher believes in God). AI’s a weak field. All round, papers don’t quite capture any field and are often way way behind what people roughly feel.
Real question: Do you want me here?
I like you guys. I agree with you philosophically. I have nothing much to offer unless I put some effort into it (e.g., actually read what people write, etc). No confusion: You should be downvoting posts like this in general. You might want to make an exception ’cause it’s worth hearing a particular rambling mindset once. My effort is better spent elsewhere (I can’t imagine you’d disagree). I can’t see anything that can be offered to me. I feel like I was more rational at age 7 than you are now (I wrote a pro and con list for castrating myself for the longevity and potential continuity of personality gains; e.g., maintaining the me of 7). A million other things. I’m working on real problems in other areas now.
This. A thousand times this. As a lawyer, LessWrong pattern matches with people outside a complicated field who are convinced that those in the fields are idiots because observers think that “the field is not that complicated.”
That said, “Boring where I can judge meaning, meaningless where I can’t.” is an unfair criticism. Lots of really excellent ideas seem boring if you had already internalized the core ideas.
Reminds me of part of a comment on Moldbug’s blot, by Nick Szabo:
I’ve been studying the history of common law lately due to Nick’s influence, after which I’m gonna read the book he recommended. I notice that his description of legal reasoning is very similar to how I use my chess subskills for rationality.
This is a moderately reasonable model of litigation, but it isn’t complete. For example, Thurgood Marshall litigated separate-but-equal in the law school context specifically because every judge has a gut feeling of how to compare law schools, which just isn’t true about other educational institutions. In law school, I heard the apocryphal story that the law for the State of Texas argued that the new segregated law school was just as good as UT Law School, and Justice Clark—a graduate of UT—passed a note to a colleague that read “Bullshit” That’s clever lawyering and has nothing to do with arguing from precedent.
Further, not all law is litigation. The legislature empowered to make new laws that have no relationship to old laws. In short, there’s a fair amount more to the practice of law than reasoning by analogy, even if reasoning by analogy is an important skill for a lawyer.
I like your style of writing. Though: too many ideas, difficult to rate and respond.
Karma always has a random component. Karma of one comment is not significant. Karma of 10 comments shows a trend. I have once received a negative karma for a comment showing an obvious error in reasoning of others; but it only happened once in maybe hundred comments, so I don’t make a drama of it. But yeah, it might be painful if that happened to someone’s first comment on LW.
Instrumental rationality is a known problem of intelligent people. My worst experience was Mensa: huge signalling, almost nothing ever done; and if something is done, it’s usually always done by the same two or three people, who could just as well have it done on their own. Compared with that, people at LW are relatively high in instrumental rationality—they have a working website, they write good articles, they do research, they organize meetups and seminars. But yes, we could do a lot better. Instead of going meta, people could focus and write about things they care about. Not doing this on a web discussion is probably a symptom of not doing it in the real life.
Yes, being convinced of one’s own rationality can lead to overconfidence. I don’t know a cure. Perhaps repeated exposure to disagreement of other rational people will eventually move one to update. Another reason for people focusing on what they are good at—providing more evidence for their rationalist friends.
Re: last three paragraphs—the choice to stay or leave is on you. Don’t participate in the discussions you consider worthless, write something about the real things you work on. (And perhaps I should do the same.) But this is not a new idea—we have regular threads “what are you working on” here.
Same dude here, despite the name. Hypothetical: Should a prof at, say, Harvard working on the genetics of longevity post and spend time here?
Discussing his own work would be identifying and probably not very productive. Let’s further say he’s pre-tenure. Top places have a very different tenure success rate than even very good places, so it’s an iffy point in his career.
Does Less Wrong have anything to offer him? And doesn’t he serve Less Wrong best by staying away and working? (or even “playing” elsewhere)
My central criticism of this place may well be that some of you won’t see there really is no question what the right answer is.
Incidentally, perfectly agree with your comment TimS, but the point is that I internalized those ideas independent of LessWrong. ViliamBur, you misunderstood my Karma point. I was merely acknowledging that my comment’s being upvoted and Dmitry’s downvoted means I can’t use it to indict the community at large (and instead was offering is as illustration of my mindset). Luke: yup. But I did skim through the papers from the institute. Not very good. I suspect I can mostly infer the sequences from very basic background knowledge in game theory, philosophy, physics, neuroscience, psych, etc, and reading current comments threads. I don’t see anything too fancy implied by the secondary sources (I enjoy reading the back-and-forth more).
Uh, what else. I enjoy HPMOR. What I like about it, however, is bad about me: Basically what Robin feared in his comment on OvercomingBias. I should (and will) go. It goes without saying that you wish me well. I just felt like saying hello because I like you. And if you can make it so I can talk to you profitably, I’d like that. Not your fault and I’m sorry to have said it, but I thought you should know.
You should reply to different commenters individually, since then it will send them each notifications that you’re replying. Few readers check all branches of the thread that they replied to.
He could discuss the less crtitical parts of his work. If there is a meetup near his home, he could go there and try to find someone to cooperate with. Or if he is expert at genetics but less expert on math, he could ask someone to help him with statistics.
Also, he could just spend here his free time, if he prefers company of rational people and has problem finding it outside of his work.
That question is relevant for all of us, experts or not. Even for me there are many things I should be doing rather than procrastinating on LW. However, I know myself -- I spent a lot of time online, so given that, at least I can choose a site that gives me intelligent discussions.
If you spend your time better, keep doing what works for you. Maybe visiting LW once a month and reading the articles in the “Main” part would be a reasonable compromise, if you want to participate. (I don’t know if there is an RSS feed for “Main”.)
Suppose you were a professional researcher looking for statistical help. Would you (A) go to a LessWrong meetup, (B), give a talk at the Statistics department of your hypothetical university, or (C) ask your colleagues which statisticians or statistically-literate graduate students they have collaborated with recently?
I’m sure the LessWrong community believes in statistics, which is good. But I don’t believe the average member of this crowd is any better at the humdrum practicalities of statistical hypothesis testing than your average working scientist. I would guess LessWrong skews younger and less expert.
You will not have a hard time finding smart rational people on the Harvard campus! Or, for that matter, near any major university.
I’m with twolier—LessWrong is fun, but I don’t see it being all that professionally valuable for people in most technical fields.
??? Seriously?