Progress Studies should be a core topic on LessWrong, and is directly relevant to LessWrong’s central mission
On most of LessWrong’s core topics, discussion is usually too abstract, and would benefit from more concreteness/object-level discussion
Expanding the set of topics regularly discussed on LessWrong to include more object-level science/history/economics would dramatically improve the quality of discussion on topics which are already common
I’ll walk through each of those one-by-one.
First, progress studies. The current stated mission of LW’s dev team is roughly “to accelerate the pace of intellectual progress”. Even aside from that being the stated mission of the team, it seems like an obviously central goal of the rationalist community in central, as well as one of the main lenses through which to study rationality-in-groups. That makes progress studies about as core a topic as, say, social psychology or decision theory.
Second, concreteness. Concrete examples are the main evidence on which our intuition builds its models. In this case, we’re thinking about questions like “what kind of technology changes induce lots of progress?”, “what might be difficult about finding such technologies?”, “to what extent do key technologies gradually develop over time?”, etc. Concrete provides a nice concrete example relevant to all of these.
Now, I’m sure someone will object that we ought to be looking at data to answer these sorts of questions rather than individual examples. Counterargument: looking at data usually requires deciding beforehand what questions to ask or hypotheses to test. For questions like these, it seems likely that we’re not even asking the right questions yet. Asking the right questions requires building more intuition, and in particular using real, concrete examples in order to build that intuition (we want our intuition-map to reflect the territory, so we have to look at the territory in order to make that map). In general, that’s the sort of power which concrete examples/use-cases provide: they inform our intuition about what questions to ask. For pre-paradigmatic studies (including progress studies and alignment), that’s much more of a bottleneck than hypothesis testing.
Third, expanding topics. Pulling from my own posts here, consider thesetwo posts on biology. Biological evolution has been widely used in LW’s discussions around alignment, usually with the message that we should not expect evolved systems to be legible. And yet, if we actually go study some biology, it turns out that biological systems are remarkably legible and modular. I can also say from experience that studying biological systems in greater depth provides lots of use-cases for testing out embedded agency models, which often reveal things which would be easy to miss when only thinking about e.g. ML systems. Organisms are embedded agents, it shouldn’t be a surprise that studying organisms is useful for embedded agency. The relevance of progress studies is analogous: if the rationalist community wants to make tangible progress by thought or experiment, then it shouldn’t be a surprise if studying the history of progress by thought or experiment (even unintentional experiment) is useful.
I think my comment in response to Raemon is applicable here as well. I found your argument as to why progress studies writ large is important persuasive. However, I do not feel as though this post is the correct way to go about that. Updating towards believing that progress studies are important has actually increased my conviction that this post should not be collated: important areas of study deserve good models, and given the diversity of posts in progress studies, the exact direction is still very nebulous and susceptible to influences like collation.
The most significant objection I have to the structure of this post is that I feel like it’s a primer/Wikipedia page, not a post explaining a specific connection. Both of the examples you provide explain the relevance of the natural system at hand to a core LessWrong discussion topic. The failure mode I’m worried about with this type of post is that there are a lot of things that have contributed to human progress, meaning that this type of historical brief could easily proliferate to an excessive extent. Like I mentioned to Raemon, I’d feel a lot better about this post if it discussed how this gear meshed with broader historical/progress trends, because then it would be a more useful tool for developing intuition. Using the spitballed three-prong test, the first post is definitely not replaceable with Wikipedia, and arguably relevant to LessWrong (though I think that condition is underspecified), and the section post is similarly acceptable, in my eyes. I’d support collation of more progress studies posts, just not this one.
Ok, I think our crux here is about how much posts should explicitly point out how their material connects to everything else.
Personally, I think there’s a lot of value in posts which explicitly do not explain how they connect, because explaining connections usually means pulling in a particular framing and suggesting particular questions/frameworks. In a pre-paradigmatic field, we don’t know what the right questions or frames are, so there’s a lot of value in just presenting the information without much framing. It’s the “go out and look at the world” part of rationality.
Now, a downside of this sort of post is that many people will come along who don’t have any idea how the material relates to anything. There’s no hand-holding in the interpretation/connections, so readers have to handle that part on their own, and not everyone is going to have enough prior scaffolding to see why the material matters at all. (I’ve definitely seen this on many of my own posts, when I present a result without explaining how it fits in with everything else.)
I think the best way to handle this sort of trade-off is to have some posts which present information (especially concrete examples) without much framing, and then separately have posts which try to frame that information and explain how things fit together (which usually also means positing hypotheses/theories). It’s very similar to the separation of empirical vs theoretical work we see in a lot of the sciences. We already have a lot of the latter sort of post, but could use a lot more of the former. So e.g. “this type of historical brief could easily proliferate to an excessive extent” is something I’d consider a very positive outcome.
I think you’re mostly right. To be clear, I think that there’s a lot of value in unfiltered information, but I mostly worry about other topics being drowned out by unfiltered information on a forum like this. My personal preference is to link out or do independent research to acquire unfiltered information in a community with specific views/frames of reference, because I think it’s always going to be skewed by that communities thought, and I don’t find research onerous.
I’d support either the creation of a separate [Briefs] tag that can be filtered like other tags, and in that case, I’d support this kind of post, but at the moment, I don’t know what the value add is for this to be on LessWrong, and I see several potential costs.
I strongly believe all of the following:
Progress Studies should be a core topic on LessWrong, and is directly relevant to LessWrong’s central mission
On most of LessWrong’s core topics, discussion is usually too abstract, and would benefit from more concreteness/object-level discussion
Expanding the set of topics regularly discussed on LessWrong to include more object-level science/history/economics would dramatically improve the quality of discussion on topics which are already common
I’ll walk through each of those one-by-one.
First, progress studies. The current stated mission of LW’s dev team is roughly “to accelerate the pace of intellectual progress”. Even aside from that being the stated mission of the team, it seems like an obviously central goal of the rationalist community in central, as well as one of the main lenses through which to study rationality-in-groups. That makes progress studies about as core a topic as, say, social psychology or decision theory.
Second, concreteness. Concrete examples are the main evidence on which our intuition builds its models. In this case, we’re thinking about questions like “what kind of technology changes induce lots of progress?”, “what might be difficult about finding such technologies?”, “to what extent do key technologies gradually develop over time?”, etc. Concrete provides a nice concrete example relevant to all of these.
Now, I’m sure someone will object that we ought to be looking at data to answer these sorts of questions rather than individual examples. Counterargument: looking at data usually requires deciding beforehand what questions to ask or hypotheses to test. For questions like these, it seems likely that we’re not even asking the right questions yet. Asking the right questions requires building more intuition, and in particular using real, concrete examples in order to build that intuition (we want our intuition-map to reflect the territory, so we have to look at the territory in order to make that map). In general, that’s the sort of power which concrete examples/use-cases provide: they inform our intuition about what questions to ask. For pre-paradigmatic studies (including progress studies and alignment), that’s much more of a bottleneck than hypothesis testing.
Third, expanding topics. Pulling from my own posts here, consider these two posts on biology. Biological evolution has been widely used in LW’s discussions around alignment, usually with the message that we should not expect evolved systems to be legible. And yet, if we actually go study some biology, it turns out that biological systems are remarkably legible and modular. I can also say from experience that studying biological systems in greater depth provides lots of use-cases for testing out embedded agency models, which often reveal things which would be easy to miss when only thinking about e.g. ML systems. Organisms are embedded agents, it shouldn’t be a surprise that studying organisms is useful for embedded agency. The relevance of progress studies is analogous: if the rationalist community wants to make tangible progress by thought or experiment, then it shouldn’t be a surprise if studying the history of progress by thought or experiment (even unintentional experiment) is useful.
I lol’d
(Well, I didn’t lol, but I smiled in amusement)
((Okay I didn’t even smile I just literally thought the words ‘concrete example, lol’))
I think my comment in response to Raemon is applicable here as well. I found your argument as to why progress studies writ large is important persuasive. However, I do not feel as though this post is the correct way to go about that. Updating towards believing that progress studies are important has actually increased my conviction that this post should not be collated: important areas of study deserve good models, and given the diversity of posts in progress studies, the exact direction is still very nebulous and susceptible to influences like collation.
The most significant objection I have to the structure of this post is that I feel like it’s a primer/Wikipedia page, not a post explaining a specific connection. Both of the examples you provide explain the relevance of the natural system at hand to a core LessWrong discussion topic. The failure mode I’m worried about with this type of post is that there are a lot of things that have contributed to human progress, meaning that this type of historical brief could easily proliferate to an excessive extent. Like I mentioned to Raemon, I’d feel a lot better about this post if it discussed how this gear meshed with broader historical/progress trends, because then it would be a more useful tool for developing intuition. Using the spitballed three-prong test, the first post is definitely not replaceable with Wikipedia, and arguably relevant to LessWrong (though I think that condition is underspecified), and the section post is similarly acceptable, in my eyes. I’d support collation of more progress studies posts, just not this one.
Ok, I think our crux here is about how much posts should explicitly point out how their material connects to everything else.
Personally, I think there’s a lot of value in posts which explicitly do not explain how they connect, because explaining connections usually means pulling in a particular framing and suggesting particular questions/frameworks. In a pre-paradigmatic field, we don’t know what the right questions or frames are, so there’s a lot of value in just presenting the information without much framing. It’s the “go out and look at the world” part of rationality.
Now, a downside of this sort of post is that many people will come along who don’t have any idea how the material relates to anything. There’s no hand-holding in the interpretation/connections, so readers have to handle that part on their own, and not everyone is going to have enough prior scaffolding to see why the material matters at all. (I’ve definitely seen this on many of my own posts, when I present a result without explaining how it fits in with everything else.)
I think the best way to handle this sort of trade-off is to have some posts which present information (especially concrete examples) without much framing, and then separately have posts which try to frame that information and explain how things fit together (which usually also means positing hypotheses/theories). It’s very similar to the separation of empirical vs theoretical work we see in a lot of the sciences. We already have a lot of the latter sort of post, but could use a lot more of the former. So e.g. “this type of historical brief could easily proliferate to an excessive extent” is something I’d consider a very positive outcome.
I think you’re mostly right. To be clear, I think that there’s a lot of value in unfiltered information, but I mostly worry about other topics being drowned out by unfiltered information on a forum like this. My personal preference is to link out or do independent research to acquire unfiltered information in a community with specific views/frames of reference, because I think it’s always going to be skewed by that communities thought, and I don’t find research onerous.
I’d support either the creation of a separate [Briefs] tag that can be filtered like other tags, and in that case, I’d support this kind of post, but at the moment, I don’t know what the value add is for this to be on LessWrong, and I see several potential costs.
Good suggestion, and I expect some mechanism along these lines will show up if and when it becomes significant.