It could be that the attitude/belief that theoretical physicists are far smarter than anyone else (and therefore, by implication, do not need to listen to anyone else) is part of the problem I’m outlining.
It could be, but I think theoretical physicists actually are very intelligent. Do you disagree?
edit: But let’s leave them aside, and talk about me, since I am actually here. I am not in the same league as Ed Witten, not even close. Do you (generic sense) have something sensible to communicate to me about how I go about my business?
edit: But let’s leave them aside, and talk about me, since I am actually here. I am not in the same league as Ed Witten, not even close. Do you (generic sense) have something sensible to communicate to me about how I go about my business?
I am not. But I do theory work, and some of it is even related to analyzing data (and I am actually here to have this conversation, whereas Ed is not). So—what do you have to teach me?
I dunno. I have PhD in engineering. In my graduate research and in my brief life as a practicing scientist, I used rationalist skills like “search for more hypotheses” and “think exclusively about the problem for five minutes before doing anything else” and generally leveraged LW-style thinking, that I didn’t learn in school, to be more successful and productive than I probably would have been otherwise. I could probably write a lengthy article about how I perceive LW to have helped me in my life, but I know that it would seem extremely post hoc and you could also probably say that the skills I’m using are not unique to LW. All I can say is that the core insight that formed the crux of my dissertation arose because I was using a very LW-style approach to analyzing a problem.
The thing about rationalist skills is that LW does not any cannot have a monopoly on them. In fact, the valuable function of LW (at least in the past) has been to both aggregate and sort through potentially actionable strategic directives and algorithms.
What’s interesting to me is that school doesn’t do that at all. I got through however-many years of schooling and earned a PhD without once taking a class about Science, about how to actually do it, about what the process of Science is. I absorbed some habits from advisers and mentors, that’s about it. The only place that I even know of where people talk at length about the inner operations of mind that correspond to the outer reality where one observes discoveries being made is Less Wrong.
And if you’re an entrepreneur and don’t care about science, then Less Wrong is also one of a few places where people talk at length about how to marshal your crappy human brain and coax it to working productively on tasks that you have deliberately and strategically chosen.
One problem is that I’m probably thinking of the Less Wrong of four years ago rather than the Less Wrong of today. In any case, all those old posts that I found so much value in are still there.
I feel like this is an important point that goes a long way to give one the intellectual / social humility IlyaShpitser is pointing at, and I agree completely that the value of LW as a site/community/etc. is primarily in sorting and aggregating. (It’s the people that do the creating or transferring.)
You are correct in that surveys of IQ and other intelligence scores consistently show physicists having some of the highest. But mathematics, statistics, computer science, and engineering are the same, and most studies I’ve seen generally see very little, if any, significant difference in intelligence scores between these fields.
‘Rationalist’ isn’t a field or specialization, it’s defined more along the lines of refining and improving rational thinking. Based on the lesswrong survey, fields like mathematics and computer science are heavily represented here. There are actually more physicists (4.3%) than philosophers (2.4%). If this is inconsistent with your perception of the community, update your prior.
From all of this it is safe to assume that the average LW’er is ‘very smart’, and that LW contains a mini-community of rationalist scientists. One data point: Me. I have a PhD in engineering and I’m a practising scientist. Maybe I should have phrased my initial comment as: “It might be better if the intersection of rationalists and scientists were larger.”
It could be that the attitude/belief that theoretical physicists are far smarter than anyone else (and therefore, by implication, do not need to listen to anyone else) is part of the problem I’m outlining.
It could be, but I think theoretical physicists actually are very intelligent. Do you disagree?
edit: But let’s leave them aside, and talk about me, since I am actually here. I am not in the same league as Ed Witten, not even close. Do you (generic sense) have something sensible to communicate to me about how I go about my business?
When did you become a theoretical physicist?
I am not. But I do theory work, and some of it is even related to analyzing data (and I am actually here to have this conversation, whereas Ed is not). So—what do you have to teach me?
I dunno. I have PhD in engineering. In my graduate research and in my brief life as a practicing scientist, I used rationalist skills like “search for more hypotheses” and “think exclusively about the problem for five minutes before doing anything else” and generally leveraged LW-style thinking, that I didn’t learn in school, to be more successful and productive than I probably would have been otherwise. I could probably write a lengthy article about how I perceive LW to have helped me in my life, but I know that it would seem extremely post hoc and you could also probably say that the skills I’m using are not unique to LW. All I can say is that the core insight that formed the crux of my dissertation arose because I was using a very LW-style approach to analyzing a problem.
The thing about rationalist skills is that LW does not any cannot have a monopoly on them. In fact, the valuable function of LW (at least in the past) has been to both aggregate and sort through potentially actionable strategic directives and algorithms.
What’s interesting to me is that school doesn’t do that at all. I got through however-many years of schooling and earned a PhD without once taking a class about Science, about how to actually do it, about what the process of Science is. I absorbed some habits from advisers and mentors, that’s about it. The only place that I even know of where people talk at length about the inner operations of mind that correspond to the outer reality where one observes discoveries being made is Less Wrong.
And if you’re an entrepreneur and don’t care about science, then Less Wrong is also one of a few places where people talk at length about how to marshal your crappy human brain and coax it to working productively on tasks that you have deliberately and strategically chosen.
One problem is that I’m probably thinking of the Less Wrong of four years ago rather than the Less Wrong of today. In any case, all those old posts that I found so much value in are still there.
I feel like this is an important point that goes a long way to give one the intellectual / social humility IlyaShpitser is pointing at, and I agree completely that the value of LW as a site/community/etc. is primarily in sorting and aggregating. (It’s the people that do the creating or transferring.)
You are correct in that surveys of IQ and other intelligence scores consistently show physicists having some of the highest. But mathematics, statistics, computer science, and engineering are the same, and most studies I’ve seen generally see very little, if any, significant difference in intelligence scores between these fields.
‘Rationalist’ isn’t a field or specialization, it’s defined more along the lines of refining and improving rational thinking. Based on the lesswrong survey, fields like mathematics and computer science are heavily represented here. There are actually more physicists (4.3%) than philosophers (2.4%). If this is inconsistent with your perception of the community, update your prior.
From all of this it is safe to assume that the average LW’er is ‘very smart’, and that LW contains a mini-community of rationalist scientists. One data point: Me. I have a PhD in engineering and I’m a practising scientist. Maybe I should have phrased my initial comment as: “It might be better if the intersection of rationalists and scientists were larger.”
While 4.3% of LW people are physicists the reverse isn’t true.