I think one type of meme that I hadn’t internalized well enough, and which other rationalists might also benefit from, is what Science Banana calls Indexicality. The masterpost for indexicality is Ignorance, A Skilled Practice; it has some flaws but I still like it. There’s also some other writings on it by Science Banana scattered in various places; there was a time when they tweeted a lot about it but I think they have stopped talking as much about it now.
I think the way I would phrase the importance is, a lot of traditional rationalist tricks seem to emphasize the value of dimension-reduction, broadly-applicable rules, and other things like that. Meanwhile a lot of real-world rationality is just about absorbing enormous amounts of detailed closely relevant information to build a good base of knowledge, and then in each specific situation figure out what the relevant knowledge is and apply that.
I think one type of meme that I hadn’t internalized well enough, and which other rationalists might also benefit from, is what Science Banana calls Indexicality. The masterpost for indexicality is Ignorance, A Skilled Practice; it has some flaws but I still like it. There’s also some other writings on it by Science Banana scattered in various places; there was a time when they tweeted a lot about it but I think they have stopped talking as much about it now.
I think the way I would phrase the importance is, a lot of traditional rationalist tricks seem to emphasize the value of dimension-reduction, broadly-applicable rules, and other things like that. Meanwhile a lot of real-world rationality is just about absorbing enormous amounts of detailed closely relevant information to build a good base of knowledge, and then in each specific situation figure out what the relevant knowledge is and apply that.