It’s analogous to a customer complaining “if Costco is going to require masks, then I’m boycotting Costco.” All else being equal, it would be nice for customers to not have to wear masks, and all else being equal, it would be nice to lower the barrier to communication such that more thoughts could be more easily included.
Just a small piece of feedback. This paragraph is very unclear, and it brushes on a political topic that tends to get heated and personal.
I think you intended to say that the norms you’re proposing are just the basic cost of entry to a space with higher levels of cooperation and value generation. But I can as easily read it as your norms being an arbitrary requirement that destroys value by forcing everyone to visibly incur pointless costs in the name of protecting against a bogeyman that is being way overblown.
This unintended double meaning seems apt to me: I mostly agree with the guidelines, but also feel that rationalists overemphasize this kind of thing and discount the costs being imposed. In particular, the guidelines are very bad for productive babbling / brainstorming, for intuitive knowledge transfer, and other less rigorous ways of communicating that I find really valuable in some situations.
The best frame for this is that better world models and better thinking is not free. It does require paying actual costs, of only in energy. Usually this cost can be very cheap, but things can get expensive in certain problems. Thus, costs are imposed for better reasoning by default.
Also, I think that babbling/brainstorming is pretty useless due to the high amount of dimensions for a lot of problems. Babbling and brainstorming scales as 2^n, with n being the number of dimensions, and for high input values of N, babbling and brainstorming is way too expensive. It’s similar to 2 of John Wentworth’s posts that I’ll link below, but in most real problems, babbling and brainstorming will make progress way too slowly to be of any relevance.
This is also why random exploration is so bad compared to focused exploration.
Links below for why I believe in the idea that babbling/brainstorming is usually not worth it:
In particular, the guidelines are very bad for productive babbling / brainstorming, for intuitive knowledge transfer, and other less rigorous ways of communicating that I find really valuable in some situations.
Strong disagree; like, strong enough that I will be blunter than usual and say “this is just false.” If you project a bunch of stuff onto the guidelines that isn’t actually there in the text, then yeah, but.
All of Julia Galef, Anna Salamon, Rob Bensinger, Scott Garrabrant, Vaniver, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Logan Brienne Strohl, Oliver Habryka, Kelsey Piper, Nate Soares, Eric Rogstad, Spencer Greenberg, and Dan Keys have engaged in productive babbling/brainstorming, intuitive knowledge transfer, and other less rigorous ways of communicating on the regular; the only difference is that they take three seconds to make clear that they’re shifting into that mode.
You didn’t address the part of my comment that I’m actually more confident about. I regret adding that last sentence, consider it retracted for now (I currently don’t think I’m wrong, but I’ll have to think/observe some more, and perhaps find better words/framing to pinpoint what bothers me about rationalist discourse).
I’m not sure what the suggestion, question, or request (in the part you’re more confident about) was. Could you nudge me a little more re: what kind of response you were hoping for?
It seems to me that you are attempting to write a timeless, prescriptive reference piece. Then a paragraph sneaks in that is heavily time and culture dependent.
I’m honestly not certain about the intended meaning. I think you intent mask wearing to be an example of a small and reasonable cost. As a non-american, I’m vaguely aware what costco is, but don’t know if there’s some connotation or reference to current events that I’m missing. And if I’m confused now, imagine someone reading this in 2030...
Without getting into the object-level discussion, I think such references have no place in the kind of post this is supposed to be, and should be cut or made more neutral.
Just a small piece of feedback. This paragraph is very unclear, and it brushes on a political topic that tends to get heated and personal.
I think you intended to say that the norms you’re proposing are just the basic cost of entry to a space with higher levels of cooperation and value generation. But I can as easily read it as your norms being an arbitrary requirement that destroys value by forcing everyone to visibly incur pointless costs in the name of protecting against a bogeyman that is being way overblown.
This unintended double meaning seems apt to me: I mostly agree with the guidelines, but also feel that rationalists overemphasize this kind of thing and discount the costs being imposed. In particular, the guidelines are very bad for productive babbling / brainstorming, for intuitive knowledge transfer, and other less rigorous ways of communicating that I find really valuable in some situations.
The best frame for this is that better world models and better thinking is not free. It does require paying actual costs, of only in energy. Usually this cost can be very cheap, but things can get expensive in certain problems. Thus, costs are imposed for better reasoning by default.
Also, I think that babbling/brainstorming is pretty useless due to the high amount of dimensions for a lot of problems. Babbling and brainstorming scales as 2^n, with n being the number of dimensions, and for high input values of N, babbling and brainstorming is way too expensive. It’s similar to 2 of John Wentworth’s posts that I’ll link below, but in most real problems, babbling and brainstorming will make progress way too slowly to be of any relevance.
This is also why random exploration is so bad compared to focused exploration.
Links below for why I believe in the idea that babbling/brainstorming is usually not worth it:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4XRjPocTprL4L8tmB/science-in-a-high-dimensional-world#comments
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pT48swb8LoPowiAzR/everyday-lessons-from-high-dimensional-optimization
Strong disagree; like, strong enough that I will be blunter than usual and say “this is just false.” If you project a bunch of stuff onto the guidelines that isn’t actually there in the text, then yeah, but.
All of Julia Galef, Anna Salamon, Rob Bensinger, Scott Garrabrant, Vaniver, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Logan Brienne Strohl, Oliver Habryka, Kelsey Piper, Nate Soares, Eric Rogstad, Spencer Greenberg, and Dan Keys have engaged in productive babbling/brainstorming, intuitive knowledge transfer, and other less rigorous ways of communicating on the regular; the only difference is that they take three seconds to make clear that they’re shifting into that mode.
You didn’t address the part of my comment that I’m actually more confident about. I regret adding that last sentence, consider it retracted for now (I currently don’t think I’m wrong, but I’ll have to think/observe some more, and perhaps find better words/framing to pinpoint what bothers me about rationalist discourse).
I’m not sure what the suggestion, question, or request (in the part you’re more confident about) was. Could you nudge me a little more re: what kind of response you were hoping for?
It seems to me that you are attempting to write a timeless, prescriptive reference piece. Then a paragraph sneaks in that is heavily time and culture dependent.
I’m honestly not certain about the intended meaning. I think you intent mask wearing to be an example of a small and reasonable cost. As a non-american, I’m vaguely aware what costco is, but don’t know if there’s some connotation or reference to current events that I’m missing. And if I’m confused now, imagine someone reading this in 2030...
Without getting into the object-level discussion, I think such references have no place in the kind of post this is supposed to be, and should be cut or made more neutral.
Compelling!