I agree with the significant claim of this post, that often if you explain a complex idea quickly/badly to someone, this will cause them to have a cached misrepresentation and be more likely to dismiss your argument in future because they round it off to something worse. In general I really like adding together twoconcepts previously discussed to point out how they build.
I’d just like to register disagreement with this part in your explanation of inferential distance:
If you and I grew up in the same town, went to the same schools, have the same color of skin, have parents in the same economic bracket who attended the same social functions, and both ended up reading Less Wrong together, the odds are that the inferential distance between us for any given set of thoughts is pretty small. If I want to communicate some new insight to you, I don’t have to reach out very far.
This feels like a large overweighting of group identity factors relative to things like ‘whether you’ve ever studied a technical subject’ or ‘how often you feel curious’. I don’t know if you intended to make such a strong claim, but I feel like things like whether you can grok ‘moloch’ as a concept to be much more dependant on whether you’ve taken an econ class than most of the things you mention.
I had exactly the same reaction: the inferential distance between me and my childhood friends completely dwarfs that between me and the typical member of the coding bootcamp I attended in San Francisco, with whom I share almost none of those features.
My experience is that I have different inferential gaps between people who share different features with me. In most of my life and conversations, the biggest gaps are coming from things like reading the sequences. But among people who are similar on a lot of levels, coming from a different socio-economic background means we have other inferential gaps, especially in terms of the way we handle money or define personal success.
I do agree that there’s an implicit weighting in terms of mentioning some factors and not others and I don’t mean to endorse 100% the exact implicit weighting, just to mention that we focus on some inferential gaps in our lives and not others for lots of reasons, and there are lots of gaps coming from the factors he did mention that are important and large and often invisible.
I agree with the significant claim of this post, that often if you explain a complex idea quickly/badly to someone, this will cause them to have a cached misrepresentation and be more likely to dismiss your argument in future because they round it off to something worse. In general I really like adding together two concepts previously discussed to point out how they build.
I’d just like to register disagreement with this part in your explanation of inferential distance:
This feels like a large overweighting of group identity factors relative to things like ‘whether you’ve ever studied a technical subject’ or ‘how often you feel curious’. I don’t know if you intended to make such a strong claim, but I feel like things like whether you can grok ‘moloch’ as a concept to be much more dependant on whether you’ve taken an econ class than most of the things you mention.
I had exactly the same reaction: the inferential distance between me and my childhood friends completely dwarfs that between me and the typical member of the coding bootcamp I attended in San Francisco, with whom I share almost none of those features.
Objection endorsed.
My experience is that I have different inferential gaps between people who share different features with me. In most of my life and conversations, the biggest gaps are coming from things like reading the sequences. But among people who are similar on a lot of levels, coming from a different socio-economic background means we have other inferential gaps, especially in terms of the way we handle money or define personal success.
I do agree that there’s an implicit weighting in terms of mentioning some factors and not others and I don’t mean to endorse 100% the exact implicit weighting, just to mention that we focus on some inferential gaps in our lives and not others for lots of reasons, and there are lots of gaps coming from the factors he did mention that are important and large and often invisible.