I’ve had a strong urge to ask about the relation between Project Hufflepuff and group epistemic rationality since you started writing this sequence. This also seems like a good time to ask because your criticism of the essays that you cite (with the caveat that you believe them to contain grains of truth) seems fundamentally to be an epistemological one. Your final remarks are altogether an uncontroversial epistemological prescription, “We have time and we should use it because other things equal taking more time increases the reliability of our reasoning.”
So, if I take it that your criticism of the lack of understanding in this area is an epistemological one, then I can imagine this sequence going one of two ways. The one way is that you’ll solve the problem, or some of it, with your individual epistemological abilities, or at least start on this and have others assist. The other way is that before discussing culture directly, you’ll discuss group epistemic rationality, bootstrapping the community’s ability to reason reliably about itself. But I don’t really like to press people on what’s coming later in their sequence. That’s what the sequence is for. Maybe I can ask some pointed questions instead.
Do you think group epistemic rationality is prior to the sort of group instrumental rationality that you’re focusing on right now? I’m not trying to stay hyperfocused on epistemic rationality per se. I’m saying that you’ve demonstrated that the group has not historically done well in an epistemological sense on understanding the open problems in this area of group instrumental rationality that you’re focusing on right now, and now I’m wondering if you, or anyone else, think that’s just a failure thus far that can be corrected by individual epistemological means only and distributed to the group, or if you think that it’s a systemic failure of the group to arrive at accurate collective judgments. Of course it’s hardly a sharp dichotomy. If one thought the latter, then one might conclude that it is important to recurse to social epistemology for entirely instrumental reasons.
If group epistemic rationality is not prior to the sort of instrumental rationality that you’re focusing on right now, then do you think it would be nevertheless more effective to address that problem first? Have you considered that in the past? Of course, it’s not entirely necessary that these topics be discussed consecutively, as opposed to simultaneously.
How common do you think knowledge of academic literature relevant to group epistemic rationality is in this group? Like, as a proxy, what proportion of people do you think know about shared information bias? The only sort of thing like this I’ve seen as common knowledge in this group is informational cascades. Just taking an opportunity to try and figure out how much private information I have, because if I have a lot, then that’s bad.
How does Project Hufflepuff relate to other group projects like LW 2.0/the New Rationality Organization, and all of the various calls for improving the quality of our social-epistemological activities? I now notice that all of those seem quite closely focused on discussion media.
I think there’s a consistent epistemic failure that leads to throwing away millennia of instrumental optimization of group dynamics in favor of a clever idea that someone had last Thursday. The narrative of extreme individual improvement borders on insanity: you think you can land on a global optimum with 30 years of one-shot optimization?
Academia may have a better process, and individual intelligence may be more targeted, but natural + memetic selection has had a LOOOT more time and data to work with. We’ll be much stronger for learning how to leverage already-existing processes than in learning how to reinvent the wheel really quickly.
I’ve had a strong urge to ask about the relation between Project Hufflepuff and group epistemic rationality since you started writing this sequence. This also seems like a good time to ask because your criticism of the essays that you cite (with the caveat that you believe them to contain grains of truth) seems fundamentally to be an epistemological one. Your final remarks are altogether an uncontroversial epistemological prescription, “We have time and we should use it because other things equal taking more time increases the reliability of our reasoning.”
So, if I take it that your criticism of the lack of understanding in this area is an epistemological one, then I can imagine this sequence going one of two ways. The one way is that you’ll solve the problem, or some of it, with your individual epistemological abilities, or at least start on this and have others assist. The other way is that before discussing culture directly, you’ll discuss group epistemic rationality, bootstrapping the community’s ability to reason reliably about itself. But I don’t really like to press people on what’s coming later in their sequence. That’s what the sequence is for. Maybe I can ask some pointed questions instead.
Do you think group epistemic rationality is prior to the sort of group instrumental rationality that you’re focusing on right now? I’m not trying to stay hyperfocused on epistemic rationality per se. I’m saying that you’ve demonstrated that the group has not historically done well in an epistemological sense on understanding the open problems in this area of group instrumental rationality that you’re focusing on right now, and now I’m wondering if you, or anyone else, think that’s just a failure thus far that can be corrected by individual epistemological means only and distributed to the group, or if you think that it’s a systemic failure of the group to arrive at accurate collective judgments. Of course it’s hardly a sharp dichotomy. If one thought the latter, then one might conclude that it is important to recurse to social epistemology for entirely instrumental reasons.
If group epistemic rationality is not prior to the sort of instrumental rationality that you’re focusing on right now, then do you think it would be nevertheless more effective to address that problem first? Have you considered that in the past? Of course, it’s not entirely necessary that these topics be discussed consecutively, as opposed to simultaneously.
How common do you think knowledge of academic literature relevant to group epistemic rationality is in this group? Like, as a proxy, what proportion of people do you think know about shared information bias? The only sort of thing like this I’ve seen as common knowledge in this group is informational cascades. Just taking an opportunity to try and figure out how much private information I have, because if I have a lot, then that’s bad.
How does Project Hufflepuff relate to other group projects like LW 2.0/the New Rationality Organization, and all of the various calls for improving the quality of our social-epistemological activities? I now notice that all of those seem quite closely focused on discussion media.
I think there’s a consistent epistemic failure that leads to throwing away millennia of instrumental optimization of group dynamics in favor of a clever idea that someone had last Thursday. The narrative of extreme individual improvement borders on insanity: you think you can land on a global optimum with 30 years of one-shot optimization?
Academia may have a better process, and individual intelligence may be more targeted, but natural + memetic selection has had a LOOOT more time and data to work with. We’ll be much stronger for learning how to leverage already-existing processes than in learning how to reinvent the wheel really quickly.
Do you think I disagree with that?