This flash class on Gears is the origin of what later became the article I wrote that introduced “gears-level” to Less Wrong. (Literally the same diagrams are there!) In fact, that article is basically a walkthrough of the flash class. The flash class, in turn, came from me trying to articulate an intuition I grokked from Eliezer’s example of him being confident, despite “outside view” reasoning, that HPMOR had a good shot at being impactful.
“The Strategic Level” was my attempt to adjust a recurring reasoning error I kept seeing. In practice it didn’t matter though AFAICT. This flash class caused people to nod along, or would make their heads explode a bit in ways some of them enjoyed, but it wouldn’t actually change how people think or behave from what I could tell. I now recognize I was basically trying to point at what John Vervaeke calls “category realizations”, which seem to emerge from a combo of experience and intelligent frame-breaking. (An example is object permanence.) In practice you can almost never cause someone to have a specific category realization even by pointing it out. Trying to get people to have more category realizations in general without pointing any of them out is frankly just absurd.
Some historical notes:
This flash class on Gears is the origin of what later became the article I wrote that introduced “gears-level” to Less Wrong. (Literally the same diagrams are there!) In fact, that article is basically a walkthrough of the flash class. The flash class, in turn, came from me trying to articulate an intuition I grokked from Eliezer’s example of him being confident, despite “outside view” reasoning, that HPMOR had a good shot at being impactful.
“The Strategic Level” was my attempt to adjust a recurring reasoning error I kept seeing. In practice it didn’t matter though AFAICT. This flash class caused people to nod along, or would make their heads explode a bit in ways some of them enjoyed, but it wouldn’t actually change how people think or behave from what I could tell. I now recognize I was basically trying to point at what John Vervaeke calls “category realizations”, which seem to emerge from a combo of experience and intelligent frame-breaking. (An example is object permanence.) In practice you can almost never cause someone to have a specific category realization even by pointing it out. Trying to get people to have more category realizations in general without pointing any of them out is frankly just absurd.