I liked this post a lot. In general, I think that the rationalist project should focus a lot more on “doing things” than on writing things. Producing tools like this is a great example of “doing things”. Other examples include starting meetups and group houses.
So, I liked this post a) for being an example of “doing things”, but also b) for being what I consider to be a good example of “doing things”. Consider that quote from Paul Graham about “live in the future and build what’s missing”. To me, this has gotta be a tool that exists in the future, and I appreciate the effort to make it happen.
Unfortunately, as I write this on 12/15/21, https://elicit.org/binary. is down. That makes me sad. It doesn’t mean the people who worked on it did a bad job though. The analogy of a phase change in chemistry comes to mind.
If you are trying to melt an ice cube and you move the temperature from 10℉ to 31℉, you were really close, but you ultimately came up empty handed. But you can’t just look at the fact that the ice cube is still solid and judge progress that way. I say that you need to look more closely at the change in temperature. I’m not sure how much movement in temperature happened here, but I don’t think it was trivial.
As for how it could have been better, I think it would have really helped to have lots and lots of examples. I’m a big fan of examples, sorta along the lines of what the specificity sequence talks about. I’m talking dozens and dozens of examples. I think that helps people grok how useful this can be and when they might want to use it. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere though, coming up with examples is weirdly difficult.
As for followup work, I don’t know what the Elicit team did and I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I don’t recall any followup posts on LessWrong or iteration. Perhaps something like that would have lead to changes that caused more adoption. I still stand by my old comments about there needing to be 1) a way to embed the prediction directly from the LessWrong text editor, and 2) things like a feed of recent predictions.
I liked this post a lot. In general, I think that the rationalist project should focus a lot more on “doing things” than on writing things. Producing tools like this is a great example of “doing things”. Other examples include starting meetups and group houses.
So, I liked this post a) for being an example of “doing things”, but also b) for being what I consider to be a good example of “doing things”. Consider that quote from Paul Graham about “live in the future and build what’s missing”. To me, this has gotta be a tool that exists in the future, and I appreciate the effort to make it happen.
Unfortunately, as I write this on 12/15/21, https://elicit.org/binary. is down. That makes me sad. It doesn’t mean the people who worked on it did a bad job though. The analogy of a phase change in chemistry comes to mind.
If you are trying to melt an ice cube and you move the temperature from 10℉ to 31℉, you were really close, but you ultimately came up empty handed. But you can’t just look at the fact that the ice cube is still solid and judge progress that way. I say that you need to look more closely at the change in temperature. I’m not sure how much movement in temperature happened here, but I don’t think it was trivial.
As for how it could have been better, I think it would have really helped to have lots and lots of examples. I’m a big fan of examples, sorta along the lines of what the specificity sequence talks about. I’m talking dozens and dozens of examples. I think that helps people grok how useful this can be and when they might want to use it. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere though, coming up with examples is weirdly difficult.
As for followup work, I don’t know what the Elicit team did and I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I don’t recall any followup posts on LessWrong or iteration. Perhaps something like that would have lead to changes that caused more adoption. I still stand by my old comments about there needing to be 1) a way to embed the prediction directly from the LessWrong text editor, and 2) things like a feed of recent predictions.