I think the question of “how to safely change the way you think, in a way that preserves a lot of commonsense things” is pretty important. This post gave me a bit of a clearer sense of “Valley of Bad Rationality” problem.
I shared some of Ben’s confusion re: what point the post was specifically making about puzzles:
I guess this generally connects with my confusion around the ontology of the post. I think it would make sense for the post to be ‘here are some problems where puzzling at them helped me understand reality’ and ‘here are some problems where puzzling at them caused me to hide parts of reality from myself’, but you seem to think it’s an attribute of the puzzle, not the way one approaches it, and I don’t have a compelling sense of why you think that.
There were some hesitations I had about curating it – to some degree, this post is a “snapshot of what CFAR is doing in 2020”, which is less obviously “timeless content”. The post depends a fair bit on the reader already knowing what CFAR is and how they relate to LessWrong. But the content was still focused on explaining concepts, which I expect to be generally useful.
It’s interesting to think about the review effort in this light. (Also, material about doing group rationality stuff can fit in with timeless content, but less in a oneshot way.)
The review has definitely had an effect on me looking at new posts, and thinking “which of these would I feel good about including in a Best of the Year Book?” as well as “which of these would I feel good about including in an actual textbook?
This post is sort of on the edge of “timeless enough that I think it’d be fine for the 2020 Review”, but I’m not sure whether it’s quite distilled enough to fit nicely into, say, the 2021 edition of “the LessWrong Textbook.” (this isn’t necessarily a complaint about the post, just noting that different posts can be optimized for different things)
Curated, with some thoughts:
I think the question of “how to safely change the way you think, in a way that preserves a lot of commonsense things” is pretty important. This post gave me a bit of a clearer sense of “Valley of Bad Rationality” problem.
This post also seemed like part of the general project of “Reconciling CFAR’s paradigm(s?) with the established LessWrong framework. In this case I’m not sure it precisely explains any parts of CFAR that people tend to find confusing. But it does lay out some frameworks that I expect to be helpful groundwork for that.
I shared some of Ben’s confusion re: what point the post was specifically making about puzzles:
There were some hesitations I had about curating it – to some degree, this post is a “snapshot of what CFAR is doing in 2020”, which is less obviously “timeless content”. The post depends a fair bit on the reader already knowing what CFAR is and how they relate to LessWrong. But the content was still focused on explaining concepts, which I expect to be generally useful.
It’s interesting to think about the review effort in this light. (Also, material about doing group rationality stuff can fit in with timeless content, but less in a oneshot way.)
The review has definitely had an effect on me looking at new posts, and thinking “which of these would I feel good about including in a Best of the Year Book?” as well as “which of these would I feel good about including in an actual textbook?
This post is sort of on the edge of “timeless enough that I think it’d be fine for the 2020 Review”, but I’m not sure whether it’s quite distilled enough to fit nicely into, say, the 2021 edition of “the LessWrong Textbook.” (this isn’t necessarily a complaint about the post, just noting that different posts can be optimized for different things)