Thank you for this discussion btw, this is helpfwl. I suspect it’s hitting diminishing returns unless we hone in on practical specifics.
I think our levels of faith in the rationality community is a crux. Here’s what I think, although I would stress again that although I tentatively believe what I say, I am not trying to be safe to defer to. Thus, I omit disclaimers and caveats and instead try to provide perspectives for evaluation. I think this warning is especially prudent here.
We have a really strong jargon hit-rate
The “natural incentives around jargon creation” in most communities favour usefwlness much less compared to this community. I can think of some examples of historically bad jargon:
“Politics is the mind killer” (not irredeemably bad, but net bad nonetheless imo)
“Bayesian”
Not confident here, but I think the term expanded too far from its roots, plus overemphasised. This could be prevented either by an increased willingness to use new terms for neighbouring semantic space, or an increased unwillingness to expand the use shibboleths for new things.
“NPC” (non-player character)
Not irredeemable, but questionable net value.
Probably more here but I can’t recall.
I think our hit-rate so far on jargon has been remarkably good. Even under the assumption that increased coinage reduces accuracy (which I weakly disagree with), it seems on the margin plausible that it will take us closer to the pareto frontier.
I am less worried about becoming marginally more insular
Our collective project is exceedingly dangerous. We’re deactivating our memetic immune system and fumbling towards deliberate epistemic practices that we hope can make up for it. I think rationality education must consist of lowering intuitive defenses in tandem with growing epistemological awareness. And in cases where this education is out of sync, it produces victims.
But I’d be wary of updating too much on Leverage as an indictment of rationality culture in general. That kind of defensiveness is the same mechanism by which hospitals get bureaucrified—they’re minimising false-positives at the cost of everything else.
I suspect that our community’s cultural inclination against these failure modes makes it more likely that our epistemic norms weaken with widespread social integration with other cultures.
I also think, more generally, that norms/advice that were necessary early on, could nowadays actively be hampering our progress. “Be less sure of yourself, seek wisdom from outside sources, etc.” is necessary advice for someone just starting out on the path, but at some point your wisdom so far exceeds outside sources that the advice hits diminishing returns—tune yourself to where you sniff out value of information, whether that be insular or not.
Thank you for this discussion btw, this is helpfwl. I suspect it’s hitting diminishing returns unless we hone in on practical specifics.
I think our levels of faith in the rationality community is a crux. Here’s what I think, although I would stress again that although I tentatively believe what I say, I am not trying to be safe to defer to. Thus, I omit disclaimers and caveats and instead try to provide perspectives for evaluation. I think this warning is especially prudent here.
We have a really strong jargon hit-rate
The “natural incentives around jargon creation” in most communities favour usefwlness much less compared to this community. I can think of some examples of historically bad jargon:
“Politics is the mind killer” (not irredeemably bad, but net bad nonetheless imo)
“Bayesian”
Not confident here, but I think the term expanded too far from its roots, plus overemphasised. This could be prevented either by an increased willingness to use new terms for neighbouring semantic space, or an increased unwillingness to expand the use shibboleths for new things.
“NPC” (non-player character)
Not irredeemable, but questionable net value.
Probably more here but I can’t recall.
I think our hit-rate so far on jargon has been remarkably good. Even under the assumption that increased coinage reduces accuracy (which I weakly disagree with), it seems on the margin plausible that it will take us closer to the pareto frontier.
I am less worried about becoming marginally more insular
Our collective project is exceedingly dangerous. We’re deactivating our memetic immune system and fumbling towards deliberate epistemic practices that we hope can make up for it. I think rationality education must consist of lowering intuitive defenses in tandem with growing epistemological awareness. And in cases where this education is out of sync, it produces victims.
But I’d be wary of updating too much on Leverage as an indictment of rationality culture in general. That kind of defensiveness is the same mechanism by which hospitals get bureaucrified—they’re minimising false-positives at the cost of everything else.
I suspect that our community’s cultural inclination against these failure modes makes it more likely that our epistemic norms weaken with widespread social integration with other cultures.
I also think, more generally, that norms/advice that were necessary early on, could nowadays actively be hampering our progress. “Be less sure of yourself, seek wisdom from outside sources, etc.” is necessary advice for someone just starting out on the path, but at some point your wisdom so far exceeds outside sources that the advice hits diminishing returns—tune yourself to where you sniff out value of information, whether that be insular or not.