Optimizing Styles
(Cross-Posted from my blog.)
You know roughly what a fighting style is, right? A set of heuristics, skills, patterns made rote for trying to steer a fight into the places where your skills are useful, means of categorizing things to get a subset of the vast overload of information available to you to make the decisions you need, tendencies to prioritize certain kinds of opportunities, that fit together. Fighting isn’t the only optimization problem where you see “styles” like this. Some of them are general enough that you can see them across many domains.
Here are some examples:
“Move fast and break things.”
“Move fast with stable infra.”
“Fail Fast.”
“Before all else, understand the problem.”
“Don’t do hard things. Turn hard things to easy things, then do easy things.”
The Sorting Hat Chats’s secondary house system.
“Start with the obviously most important thing, and work backwards from there.”
“The future is stable. Make long-term plans.”
“The future is unstable. Prioritize the imminent because you know it’s real.”
Just as fighting styles are distinct from why you would fight, optimizing styles are distinct from what you value.
In limited optimization domains like games, there is known to be a one true style. The style that is everything. The null style. Raw “what is available and how can I exploit it”, with no preferred way for the game to play out. Like Scathach’s fighting style.
If you know probability and decision theory, you’ll know there is a one true style for optimization in general too. All the other ways are fragments of it, and they derive their power from the degree to which they approximate it.
Don’t think this means it is irrational to favor an optimization style besides the null style. The ideal agent, may use the null style, but the ideal agent doesn’t have skill or non-skill at things. As a bounded agent, you must take into account skill as a resource. And even if you’ve gained skills for irrational reasons, those are the resources you have.
Don’t think that since one of the optimization styles you feel motivated to use is explicit in the way it tries to be the one true style, that it is the one true style.
It is very very easy to leave something crucial out of your explicitly-thought-out optimization. I assert that having done that is a possibility you must always consider if you’re feeling divided, distinct from subagent value differences and subagent belief differences.
Hour for hour, one of the most valuable things I’ve ever done was “wasting my time” watching a bunch of videos on the internet because I wanted to. The specific videos I wanted to watch were from the YouTube atheist community of old. “Pwned” videos, the vlogging equivalent of fisking. Debates over theism with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Very adversarial, not much of people trying to improve their own world-model through arguing. But I was fascinated. Eventually I came to notice how many of the arguments of my side were terrible. And I gravitated towards vloggers who made less terrible arguments. This lead to me watching a lot of philosophy videos. And getting into philosophy of ethics. My pickiness about arguments grew. I began talking about ethical philosophy with all my friends. I wanted to know what everyone would do in the trolley problem. This led to me becoming a vegetarian, then a vegan. Then reading a forum about utilitarian philosophy led me to find the LessWrong sequences, and the most important problem in the world.
It’s not luck that this happened. When you have certain values and aptitudes, it’s a predictable consequence of following long enough the joy of knowing something that feels like it deeply matters, that few other people know, the shocking novelty of “how is everyone so wrong?”, the satisfying clarity of actually knowing why something is true or false with your own power, the intriguing dissonance of moral dilemmas and paradoxes...
It wasn’t just curiosity as a pure detached value, predictably having a side effect good for my other values either. My curiosity steered me toward knowledge that felt like it mattered to me.
It turns out the optimal move was in fact “learn things”. Specifically, “learn how to think better”. And watching all those “Pwned” videos and following my curiosity from there was a way (for me) to actually do that, far better than lib arts classes in college.
I was not wise enough to calculate explicitly the value of learning to think better. And if I had calculated that, I probably would have come up with a worse way to accomplish it than just “train your argument discrimination on a bunch of actual arguments of steadily increasing refinement”. Non-explicit optimizing style subagent for the win.
I am confused and think this needs an introductory paragraph. Can you add one in?
I’m not feeling motivated to add a new introductory paragraph. Here are some of my reasons:
Unclear what is wrong, what particularly caused you to be confused.
Priors about tradeoffs with level of repetition colliding with my ideas about my target audience.
Priors about how many iterations it takes to make it much less confusing colliding with guesses about the feedback loop I’d get from trying to alleviate your confusion. How many times would you respond? How much detail would you respond in? How fast would it be? How long would I have to spend checking LessWrong to see if I got another comment?
Guesses about how long it would take and what else I could be doing with my time. (Finishing one of my many draft blog posts while I’m on the train right now, for instance.)
If it helps -- I don’t understand what the second half (from the part about Youtube videos onwards) has to do with fighting or optimizing styles.
I also didn’t glean what an ‘optimizing style’ is, so I think the point is lost on me.
Regardless of your laundry list of reasons not to edit your post, you should read “I’m confused about what you wrote” comments, if you believe them to be legitimate criticisms, as a sign that your personal filter on your own writing is not catching certain problems, so you might be highly benefitted by taking it as an opportunity to work on your filter so you can see what we see. Upgrading your filter on your own work leads to systematic improvement across all of your work instead of just improvements to the one we’re talking about.
If you’re worried about responsiveness, you might get further by just asking for more detail before making changes instead of explaining, approximately, “I don’t feel like making changes because I’m not convinced that it’ll be a good use of my time or that I’ll get more responses to make it successful”. (I won’t fault you for lacking motivation, of course not, that’s the battle we all fight—but I also suspect that you’d profit considerably from finding that motivation, since it might lead to systematic improvement of your writing.)
This is good detail. Thank you for it. I have made adjustments. Most importantly, to the first paragraph, and a transition before the YouTube paragraph.
I’m not reading what you said as a promise to help me iterate, and don’t want you to think you’re obligated. I have already gotten value as-is. But if you want to compare with the original, it’s still unmodified in the copy on my blog for now.