Claim: a typical rationalist is likely to be relying too much on legibility, and would benefit from sometimes not requiring an immediate explicit justification for their beliefs.
Question: What empirical evidence do you have about this? (E.g., what do you observe introspectively, what have you seen others doing, etc., and how sure are you that those things are the way you think they are?)
Well I don’t really have a justification for it (ha), but I’ve noticed that explicit deductive thought rarely leads me to insights that turn out to be useful. Instead, I find that simply waiting for ideas to pop into my head, makes the right ideas pop into my head.
Question: How representative do you think posts on Less Wrong are in terms of how rationalists make decisions in practise? If there is a difference, do you think spending time on LW may affect your perspective on how rationalists make decisions?
(1) What is your favourite LW post (or blog post) for?
(2) How do you think the opinions of LW posters will be expressed (if they are not on the ‘better’ topics you might like to include)?
(3) Any existing LW comments are very very welcome.
(4) If you are a regular poster, what is the biggest incentive for you to comment?
(5) This website is very personal, and you may have trouble detecting people’s personal page, so you might want to make a serious shot at understanding what is going on here.
I think a large part of LW’s appeal is to “people feel comfortable and positive”, and we are all strongly in favor of this.
Some of my friends think that Less Wrong, and many of my communities’ memes, are much more effective than other memes, and the truth of this is most apparent in the media.
I think the truth of this whole business is most clear in the meme.
(I don’t actually know that much (though there is an interesting and surprising amount of writing by smart people).)
That last parenthetical remark is funny when you consider how GPT-2 knows nothing new but just reshuffles the “interesting and surprising amount of writing by smart people”.
This is indeed interesting and informative—I can’t see anything else on that thread except the title. How does Eliezer link to this “thing” and this “thing” when he says that it’s a “boring idea”?
I consider myself to be one of the most intelligent people in the world.
Let me say it again, this is one of those things you’re advocating for.
I have never shown a clear, clear avenue for finding truth, and I don’t find it very convincing. The word “acoustic vibrations” seems like its own word, but that doesn’t mean I have anything to add to the argument—unless you mean to refer to an ongoing auditory experience before proceeding. The best way I can tell you is that your brain was designed to detect this, not to assess the actual auditory experience.
The best way I can tell you is that your brain was designed to detect this, not assess the actual experience.
For a brief, though, my favorite quote of yours:
“There are many cases where auditory experiences are so unpleasant that we don’t notice them or listen to them. Like visual scenes, if we are to consider the problem in our own mental peculiarities, we simply cannot proceed there.”
I agree, especially when I say this, but there seems to be an advantage to the idea of people being able to perceive certain kinds of events in a way that unifies them into concrete, easily recognizeable experiences. That is, if the conscious mind/mind can recognize objects in the light of sound, then you can, without being deaf, imagine hearing somebody else speak in a tone of shock and outrage that doesn’t sound right. All this, the way to understand speech, is to understand the listener’s reaction, without sounding heard. But for most people, it isn’t enough. We can recognize most of the discomfort ourselves easily, especially if we’re doing something weird. And yet, this ability to recognize objects like attacking them with a trump card is an essential part of language education, filling
Clarification request: At face value you’re implying that typical rationalists always do require immediate explicit justification for their beliefs. I wonder whether that’s an exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Could you be a bit more, um, explicit about just what the state of affairs is that you’re suggesting is suboptimal?
Claim: a typical rationalist is likely to be relying too much on legibility, and would benefit from sometimes not requiring an immediate explicit justification for their beliefs.
Question: What empirical evidence do you have about this? (E.g., what do you observe introspectively, what have you seen others doing, etc., and how sure are you that those things are the way you think they are?)
Well I don’t really have a justification for it (ha), but I’ve noticed that explicit deductive thought rarely leads me to insights that turn out to be useful. Instead, I find that simply waiting for ideas to pop into my head, makes the right ideas pop into my head.
Question: How representative do you think posts on Less Wrong are in terms of how rationalists make decisions in practise? If there is a difference, do you think spending time on LW may affect your perspective on how rationalists make decisions?
A few related questions:
(1) What is your favourite LW post (or blog post) for?
(2) How do you think the opinions of LW posters will be expressed (if they are not on the ‘better’ topics you might like to include)?
(3) Any existing LW comments are very very welcome.
(4) If you are a regular poster, what is the biggest incentive for you to comment?
(5) This website is very personal, and you may have trouble detecting people’s personal page, so you might want to make a serious shot at understanding what is going on here.
I think a large part of LW’s appeal is to “people feel comfortable and positive”, and we are all strongly in favor of this.
Some of my friends think that Less Wrong, and many of my communities’ memes, are much more effective than other memes, and the truth of this is most apparent in the media.
I think the truth of this whole business is most clear in the meme.
(I don’t actually know that much (though there is an interesting and surprising amount of writing by smart people).)
That last parenthetical remark is funny when you consider how GPT-2 knows nothing new but just reshuffles the “interesting and surprising amount of writing by smart people”.
Eliezer,
This is indeed interesting and informative—I can’t see anything else on that thread except the title. How does Eliezer link to this “thing” and this “thing” when he says that it’s a “boring idea”?
Who do you mean with the phrase typical rationalist?
I think “typical X does Y” is shorthand for “many or most Xs do Y”.
That still leaves open what “X” is.
There’s a way to put this in a sentence like this:
We have now established that a monist approach to overcoming a bias is good.
So, this sentence has been read on LW (a link is at http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jb/the_rationality_contribution/):
I consider myself to be one of the most intelligent people in the world.
This sentence has been read on LW (a link is athttp://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jb/the_rationality_contribution/):
I consider myself to be one of the most intelligent people in the world.
Let me say it again, this is one of those things you’re advocating for.
I have never shown a clear, clear avenue for finding truth, and I don’t find it very convincing. The word “acoustic vibrations” seems like its own word, but that doesn’t mean I have anything to add to the argument—unless you mean to refer to an ongoing auditory experience before proceeding. The best way I can tell you is that your brain was designed to detect this, not to assess the actual auditory experience.
The best way I can tell you is that your brain was designed to detect this, not assess the actual experience.
For a brief, though, my favorite quote of yours:
“There are many cases where auditory experiences are so unpleasant that we don’t notice them or listen to them. Like visual scenes, if we are to consider the problem in our own mental peculiarities, we simply cannot proceed there.”
I agree, especially when I say this, but there seems to be an advantage to the idea of people being able to perceive certain kinds of events in a way that unifies them into concrete, easily recognizeable experiences. That is, if the conscious mind/mind can recognize objects in the light of sound, then you can, without being deaf, imagine hearing somebody else speak in a tone of shock and outrage that doesn’t sound right. All this, the way to understand speech, is to understand the listener’s reaction, without sounding heard. But for most people, it isn’t enough. We can recognize most of the discomfort ourselves easily, especially if we’re doing something weird. And yet, this ability to recognize objects like attacking them with a trump card is an essential part of language education, filling
I’m not sure they were the same thing, but I agree with the OP about what it was.
Not entirely? I don’t think that “typical irrationalist” is that precise, but it’s what I’ll be talking about when I write this post.
Clarification request: At face value you’re implying that typical rationalists always do require immediate explicit justification for their beliefs. I wonder whether that’s an exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Could you be a bit more, um, explicit about just what the state of affairs is that you’re suggesting is suboptimal?
You saw that correctly. What I mean is too often, not always.