I feel as though these type of posts add relatively little value to LessWrong, however, this post has quite a few upvotes. I don’t think novelty is a prerequisite for a high-quality post, but I feel as though this post was both not novel and not relevant, which worries me. I think that most of the information presented in this article is a. Not actionable b. Not related to LessWrong, and c. Easily replaceable with a Wikipedia or similar search. This would be my totally spot balled test for a topical post: at least one of these 3 must be satisfied. I have a few hypotheses for there’s an apparent demand discrepancy:
H1: The majority of users upvoting this content are upvoting the (high-quality and engaging) writing style and presentation of information.
H2: I’m (relatively) unique in my feeling that a gears-level understanding of the process of construction material is not particularly relevant to LessWrong
H3: The majority of users upvoting this content derived some broader understanding from the specific content of the post.
H4: the majority of users upvoting the content did so because they felt the post allowed them to make a tangentially related intellectual leap, realization, or connection that would have also been triggered with a 1-paragraph summary
H5: there is a small contingent of LessWrongers who REALLY enjoy progress studies, and routinely upvote all related posts in an effort to shift community norms or subconsciously.
If H1 is true, then I strongly support downvoting this post, regardless of its individual merit: these kind of posts, while potentially engaging on their own, should not be promoted to prevent proliferation. Featuring one in a review suggests, at the minimum, that this community specifically values these contributions. It also doesn’t improve the strength of the printed work: extraneous information is not particularly compelling, even if it is well-presented. I think this is the most likely hypothesis by elimination. I don’t know if this belief is due to the typical mind fallacy.
If H2 is true, then I’m fairly sure I’m not qualified to judge collation on the merits: P(I have an accurate picture of the merits of the post|I have an inaccurate picture of the relevancy of the post) seems very small. I’d suggest upvoting if you are someone who agrees with H2 by personal experience.
If H3 is true, than I’d still oppose curation, UNLESS you derived an insight that truthifies H3 for you AND you feel it is obvious/clear from the content of the post. If either of these conditions is false, I’m pretty sure that this post shouldn’t be curated. In the case that the post contains valuable insights that aren’t expressed clearly, which seems likely to irritate readers that don’t understand them, and isn’t exactly the type of content we’d like to promote. I assign a low but non-zero chance to this: my post comprehension is generally pretty good, but it would be incredibly stupid for me to believe that it has 0 probability. The fact that no commenters have expressed this type of realization decreases the chance of this.
If H4 is true, I’d oppose curation, for the same reason discussed in the previous discussion
If H5 is true, I don’t quite know what to say, and I’d probably oppose curation: I’d like to think curation is the product of broad community approval, rather than small subgroups, as I think the terminal impact of that is quite bad. I assign an extremely low probability to this being the primary reason, and a much higher probability to this being a secondary reason.
I’d reccomend based voting on what hypothesis you think is true; I think my preference is well-expressed above.
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 disagree with this comment, but upvoted it because I think it does a good job exploring the question “how do we evaluate blogposts of varying types?” which I still feel pretty overall confused about)
There’s maybe two separate question of “does this deserve a bunch of upvotes?” and “does this deserve to be in the 2019 Review Book(s)?”
I didn’t upvote this post, but I might have, for a couple reasons. One major one is novelty. Right now there aren’t that many LessWrong posts that explore object level worldmodeling. Rather than ask “is this a fit for LessWrong’s main topics?” I think it’s actually often useful to ask “does this expand on LessWrong’s main topics in a way that is potentially fruitful?”. I think intellectual progress depends in part on people curiously exploring and writing up things that they are interested in, even if we don’t have a clear picture of how they fall fit together.
Separately, I do think Progress Studies are (probably) particularly important to what I think of as one of LessWrong’s central goals: using applied rationality to put a dent in universe. I’m not sure this particular piece was crucial (I haven’t re-read it recently). But, I think understanding how human progress works, in the general sense, is disproportionately likely to yield insight into how to cause more progress to happen in important domains.
I think that’s valuable enough to consider upvoting, and valuable enough to consider it for a retrospective best-of Review. I think for in both cases it depends more on the specifics of the post, and whether it, in fact, led to some kind of later insight. (Part of the point of a retrospective review is you don’t have to guess whether something would provide useful insight – you know whether it actually helped you in the past 1.5 years).
(strong-upvoted, I think this discussion is productive and fruitful)
I think this is an interesting distinction. I think I’m probably interpreting the goals of a review as more of a “Let’s create a body of gold standard work,” whereas it seems as though you’re interpreting it more through a lens of “Let’s showcase interesting work.” I think the central question where these two differ is exemplified by this post: what happens when we get a post that is nice to have in small quantities. In the review-as-goal world, that’s not a super helpful post to curate. In the review-as-interest world, that’s absolutely a useful facet to curate. I also think that while H5 might not be true in this case, we’d have opposite recommendations of it was true, but I could be wrong about that.
Separately, I’m not sure that even given that we want to be endorsing gears-level pieces on progress studies, this is the specific work we want to curate: I’d like to see more on the specific implications and consequences of concrete and how it “meshes” with other gears (i.e. for an unrelated field, agriculture, this probably would involve at least tangential discussion of the change in societal slack brought on by agriculture). I suspect this would go a long way towards making this piece feel relevant to me.
OP here. I will recuse myself from the conversation about whether this deserves to be in any list or collection. However, on the topic of whether it belongs on LW at all, I’ll just note that I was specifically invited by LW admins to cross-post my blog here.
I think this comment is convincing to me that the post should NOT be curated.
I upvoted primarily for H1 because I enjoyed reading it, and partly for H2.
I think reading more gears-level descriptions of things from day to day life is helpful for keeping an accurate reductionist picture of reality. In particular, I want to reinforce in myself the idea that mundane inventions (1) have a long history with many steps (2) solve specific problems, and (3) are part of an ongoing process that contains problems yet to be solved.
That makes this post nice for me to read day to day, but it makes it definitively NOT a post that I care about revisiting or that I think expands the type of thinking that the curation is trying to build.
I notice I am confused.
I feel as though these type of posts add relatively little value to LessWrong, however, this post has quite a few upvotes. I don’t think novelty is a prerequisite for a high-quality post, but I feel as though this post was both not novel and not relevant, which worries me. I think that most of the information presented in this article is a. Not actionable b. Not related to LessWrong, and c. Easily replaceable with a Wikipedia or similar search. This would be my totally spot balled test for a topical post: at least one of these 3 must be satisfied. I have a few hypotheses for there’s an apparent demand discrepancy:
H1: The majority of users upvoting this content are upvoting the (high-quality and engaging) writing style and presentation of information.
H2: I’m (relatively) unique in my feeling that a gears-level understanding of the process of construction material is not particularly relevant to LessWrong
H3: The majority of users upvoting this content derived some broader understanding from the specific content of the post.
H4: the majority of users upvoting the content did so because they felt the post allowed them to make a tangentially related intellectual leap, realization, or connection that would have also been triggered with a 1-paragraph summary
H5: there is a small contingent of LessWrongers who REALLY enjoy progress studies, and routinely upvote all related posts in an effort to shift community norms or subconsciously.
If H1 is true, then I strongly support downvoting this post, regardless of its individual merit: these kind of posts, while potentially engaging on their own, should not be promoted to prevent proliferation. Featuring one in a review suggests, at the minimum, that this community specifically values these contributions. It also doesn’t improve the strength of the printed work: extraneous information is not particularly compelling, even if it is well-presented. I think this is the most likely hypothesis by elimination. I don’t know if this belief is due to the typical mind fallacy.
If H2 is true, then I’m fairly sure I’m not qualified to judge collation on the merits: P(I have an accurate picture of the merits of the post|I have an inaccurate picture of the relevancy of the post) seems very small. I’d suggest upvoting if you are someone who agrees with H2 by personal experience.
If H3 is true, than I’d still oppose curation, UNLESS you derived an insight that truthifies H3 for you AND you feel it is obvious/clear from the content of the post. If either of these conditions is false, I’m pretty sure that this post shouldn’t be curated. In the case that the post contains valuable insights that aren’t expressed clearly, which seems likely to irritate readers that don’t understand them, and isn’t exactly the type of content we’d like to promote. I assign a low but non-zero chance to this: my post comprehension is generally pretty good, but it would be incredibly stupid for me to believe that it has 0 probability. The fact that no commenters have expressed this type of realization decreases the chance of this.
If H4 is true, I’d oppose curation, for the same reason discussed in the previous discussion
If H5 is true, I don’t quite know what to say, and I’d probably oppose curation: I’d like to think curation is the product of broad community approval, rather than small subgroups, as I think the terminal impact of that is quite bad. I assign an extremely low probability to this being the primary reason, and a much higher probability to this being a secondary reason.
I’d reccomend based voting on what hypothesis you think is true; I think my preference is well-expressed above.
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.
(I disagree with this comment, but upvoted it because I think it does a good job exploring the question “how do we evaluate blogposts of varying types?” which I still feel pretty overall confused about)
There’s maybe two separate question of “does this deserve a bunch of upvotes?” and “does this deserve to be in the 2019 Review Book(s)?”
I didn’t upvote this post, but I might have, for a couple reasons. One major one is novelty. Right now there aren’t that many LessWrong posts that explore object level worldmodeling. Rather than ask “is this a fit for LessWrong’s main topics?” I think it’s actually often useful to ask “does this expand on LessWrong’s main topics in a way that is potentially fruitful?”. I think intellectual progress depends in part on people curiously exploring and writing up things that they are interested in, even if we don’t have a clear picture of how they fall fit together.
Separately, I do think Progress Studies are (probably) particularly important to what I think of as one of LessWrong’s central goals: using applied rationality to put a dent in universe. I’m not sure this particular piece was crucial (I haven’t re-read it recently). But, I think understanding how human progress works, in the general sense, is disproportionately likely to yield insight into how to cause more progress to happen in important domains.
I think that’s valuable enough to consider upvoting, and valuable enough to consider it for a retrospective best-of Review. I think for in both cases it depends more on the specifics of the post, and whether it, in fact, led to some kind of later insight. (Part of the point of a retrospective review is you don’t have to guess whether something would provide useful insight – you know whether it actually helped you in the past 1.5 years).
(strong-upvoted, I think this discussion is productive and fruitful)
I think this is an interesting distinction. I think I’m probably interpreting the goals of a review as more of a “Let’s create a body of gold standard work,” whereas it seems as though you’re interpreting it more through a lens of “Let’s showcase interesting work.” I think the central question where these two differ is exemplified by this post: what happens when we get a post that is nice to have in small quantities. In the review-as-goal world, that’s not a super helpful post to curate. In the review-as-interest world, that’s absolutely a useful facet to curate. I also think that while H5 might not be true in this case, we’d have opposite recommendations of it was true, but I could be wrong about that.
Separately, I’m not sure that even given that we want to be endorsing gears-level pieces on progress studies, this is the specific work we want to curate: I’d like to see more on the specific implications and consequences of concrete and how it “meshes” with other gears (i.e. for an unrelated field, agriculture, this probably would involve at least tangential discussion of the change in societal slack brought on by agriculture). I suspect this would go a long way towards making this piece feel relevant to me.
OP here. I will recuse myself from the conversation about whether this deserves to be in any list or collection. However, on the topic of whether it belongs on LW at all, I’ll just note that I was specifically invited by LW admins to cross-post my blog here.
Thanks! I’m obviously not saying I want to remove this post, I enjoyed it. I’m mostly wondering how we want to norm-set going forwards.
I think this comment is convincing to me that the post should NOT be curated.
I upvoted primarily for H1 because I enjoyed reading it, and partly for H2.
I think reading more gears-level descriptions of things from day to day life is helpful for keeping an accurate reductionist picture of reality. In particular, I want to reinforce in myself the idea that mundane inventions (1) have a long history with many steps (2) solve specific problems, and (3) are part of an ongoing process that contains problems yet to be solved.
That makes this post nice for me to read day to day, but it makes it definitively NOT a post that I care about revisiting or that I think expands the type of thinking that the curation is trying to build.