I want to experiment with including exercises and/or discussion prompts for this sequence. This post is fairly general, so let’s start with just a few
What coordination problems have you actually run into over the past few years? What seemed to be the underlying cause of them? How tractable were they to solve? If they had been solved, how much value would have been generated?
(this question seems useful both for checking whether this sequence will actually be practically useful for you, and, if so, giving you some hooks for how to apply later posts)
Have you run into situations where ‘meta-coordination-failures’ seemed to be the problem? i.e. where multiple people were trying to solve a coordination problem using different approaches? How did those situations go? Were there any unilateral actions could you have taken to help them go better (without relying on other people doing anything different)?
I show care and respect for people by only scheduling things when I know even a 5th percentile outcome has me showing up on time and in a reasonably good mood, at the cost of scheduling fewer things. A very good friend of mine shows care and respect for people by squeezing them in when she doesn’t really have time, so she’s often late and kind of frazzled. We never solved this, and we could never agree on how to solve it, in part because that required agreeing on a time to do so.
Some of the difficulty is baggage from when we were worse at things and I think if I ran into the same problem with a new person I’d do somewhat better, but in my heart I still kind of believe the answer is “you stop being wrong”.
I attended a low tier university, after having left a higher tier university because of mental health issues.
I consistently struggled to find peers who were interested in studying the things I was interested in, or simply learning for learning’s sake. I was aware that my program of supplementary self education would have benefited from finding peers, though I never successfully found peers to study with.
There’s one: the coordination problem of discovering peers. This seems broadly improved by the existence of an internet, examples in this forum, and in subcommunities like reddit, but I’m continually uncertain how to use those tools to meet people. So there’s a second coordination problem: how to use the tools.
Agreed. I wish I’d found this community like 3 years earlier (~2014), it could’ve changed the course of my life. Note that aspiring rationalists or “sanepunks” remain in short supply; I just hosted an ACX meetup in a city of 1.2 million, and no one showed up.
As soon as I started reading this, the topic of automated epistemic coordination came to mind. So, I spend a lot of time on the ACX forums. And traditionally we’ve all independently tried to figure out the truth and then maybe we wander over to ACX where we communicate our findings with each other mostly from memory, without references, in a non-searchable (Google ignores it) database of comments sorted chronologically. There is no voting or reputation system there either.
It’s an inefficient way to learn and an awful filing system. LW is a little better, but not much, and more limited in scope than ACX. So I’ve been thinking there should be an “evidence clearinghouse” website for recording a massive hierarchy (directed acyclic graph) of claims, counterclaims and the evidence for each. It would include attributes of StackOverflow (voting & reputation system, with collaborative and competitive aspects) and Wikipedia (a hyperlinked web of information with academic and non-academic references).
I envision that larger claims (“humans are responsible for the increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere over the last 100 years”) can be built out of smaller claims (“Law of conservation of mass” + “Human CO2 emissions are greater than the rate of atmospheric increase”) which themselves can be built out of even smaller claims (“Estimates of annual human CO2 emissions” + “Rate of atmospheric increase / keeling curve”). And then, importantly, the reputation of smaller claims contributes to larger claims provided that users judge the logic as sound. Also, negative reputation in subclaims drags down the credibility of claims that use them. And obviously, voting needs to be more sophisticated than just “up” and “down”. (and surely some sort of Bayesian math should be in there somewhere.)
Anyway, there’s lots of details to work out and I have neither money nor time to build it (yet), but I do want to highlight the value of automated coordination algorithms. Systems like this could also nudge non-rationalists to coordinate with each other too, just by using a web site. And that’s a big deal!
Less important, I’ve been trying to work out how to build an open-source community for a decade or so, and not only has it not worked, it’s really rare even to find someone who understands or cares about any of the goals. It’s weird because the problem is seems almost obvious to me. I can’t even tell if what I’m bad at is solving coordination problems, or advertising, or communication, or if nobody has time to write software for free these days.
Meta-coordination:
Well, I talked to a guy on Reddit about that web site idea. He had a similar idea but different, described it, then I said that overall I preferred my version of the idea, and… no response; the discussion ended right then and there. We are so bad at this.
I want to experiment with including exercises and/or discussion prompts for this sequence. This post is fairly general, so let’s start with just a few
What coordination problems have you actually run into over the past few years? What seemed to be the underlying cause of them? How tractable were they to solve? If they had been solved, how much value would have been generated?
(this question seems useful both for checking whether this sequence will actually be practically useful for you, and, if so, giving you some hooks for how to apply later posts)
Have you run into situations where ‘meta-coordination-failures’ seemed to be the problem? i.e. where multiple people were trying to solve a coordination problem using different approaches? How did those situations go? Were there any unilateral actions could you have taken to help them go better (without relying on other people doing anything different)?
I show care and respect for people by only scheduling things when I know even a 5th percentile outcome has me showing up on time and in a reasonably good mood, at the cost of scheduling fewer things. A very good friend of mine shows care and respect for people by squeezing them in when she doesn’t really have time, so she’s often late and kind of frazzled. We never solved this, and we could never agree on how to solve it, in part because that required agreeing on a time to do so.
Some of the difficulty is baggage from when we were worse at things and I think if I ran into the same problem with a new person I’d do somewhat better, but in my heart I still kind of believe the answer is “you stop being wrong”.
I attended a low tier university, after having left a higher tier university because of mental health issues.
I consistently struggled to find peers who were interested in studying the things I was interested in, or simply learning for learning’s sake. I was aware that my program of supplementary self education would have benefited from finding peers, though I never successfully found peers to study with.
There’s one: the coordination problem of discovering peers. This seems broadly improved by the existence of an internet, examples in this forum, and in subcommunities like reddit, but I’m continually uncertain how to use those tools to meet people. So there’s a second coordination problem: how to use the tools.
Agreed. I wish I’d found this community like 3 years earlier (~2014), it could’ve changed the course of my life. Note that aspiring rationalists or “sanepunks” remain in short supply; I just hosted an ACX meetup in a city of 1.2 million, and no one showed up.
Coordination problems:
As soon as I started reading this, the topic of automated epistemic coordination came to mind. So, I spend a lot of time on the ACX forums. And traditionally we’ve all independently tried to figure out the truth and then maybe we wander over to ACX where we communicate our findings with each other mostly from memory, without references, in a non-searchable (Google ignores it) database of comments sorted chronologically. There is no voting or reputation system there either.
It’s an inefficient way to learn and an awful filing system. LW is a little better, but not much, and more limited in scope than ACX. So I’ve been thinking there should be an “evidence clearinghouse” website for recording a massive hierarchy (directed acyclic graph) of claims, counterclaims and the evidence for each. It would include attributes of StackOverflow (voting & reputation system, with collaborative and competitive aspects) and Wikipedia (a hyperlinked web of information with academic and non-academic references).
I envision that larger claims (“humans are responsible for the increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere over the last 100 years”) can be built out of smaller claims (“Law of conservation of mass” + “Human CO2 emissions are greater than the rate of atmospheric increase”) which themselves can be built out of even smaller claims (“Estimates of annual human CO2 emissions” + “Rate of atmospheric increase / keeling curve”). And then, importantly, the reputation of smaller claims contributes to larger claims provided that users judge the logic as sound. Also, negative reputation in subclaims drags down the credibility of claims that use them. And obviously, voting needs to be more sophisticated than just “up” and “down”. (and surely some sort of Bayesian math should be in there somewhere.)
Anyway, there’s lots of details to work out and I have neither money nor time to build it (yet), but I do want to highlight the value of automated coordination algorithms. Systems like this could also nudge non-rationalists to coordinate with each other too, just by using a web site. And that’s a big deal!
Less important, I’ve been trying to work out how to build an open-source community for a decade or so, and not only has it not worked, it’s really rare even to find someone who understands or cares about any of the goals. It’s weird because the problem is seems almost obvious to me. I can’t even tell if what I’m bad at is solving coordination problems, or advertising, or communication, or if nobody has time to write software for free these days.
Meta-coordination:
Well, I talked to a guy on Reddit about that web site idea. He had a similar idea but different, described it, then I said that overall I preferred my version of the idea, and… no response; the discussion ended right then and there. We are so bad at this.