I claim that conversations about good fuzzy abstract clusters are both difficult, and especially in the comparative advantage of LessWrong. I claim that LW was basically founded on analogy, specifically the analogy between human cognition and agent foundations/AI. The rest of the world is not very precise, and that is a point for LW having a precision comparative advantage, but the rest of the world seems to also be lacking abstraction skill.
The claim that precision requires purity leads to the conclusion that you have to choose between precision and abstraction, and it also leads to the conclusion that precision is fragile, and thus that you should expect a priori for there to less of it naturally, but it is otherwise symmetric between precision and abstraction. It is only saying that we should pick a lane, not which lane it should be.
I claim that when I look at science academia, I see a bunch of precision directed in inefficient ways, together with a general failure to generalize across pre-defined academic fields, and even more of a failure to generalize out of the field of “science” and into the real world.
Warning: I am mostly conflating abstraction with analogy with lack of precision above, and maybe the point is that we need precise analogies.
I claim that conversations about good fuzzy abstract clusters are both difficult, and especially in the comparative advantage of LessWrong. I claim that LW was basically founded on analogy, specifically the analogy between human cognition and agent foundations/AI. The rest of the world is not very precise, and that is a point for LW having a precision comparative advantage, but the rest of the world seems to also be lacking abstraction skill.
The claim that precision requires purity leads to the conclusion that you have to choose between precision and abstraction, and it also leads to the conclusion that precision is fragile, and thus that you should expect a priori for there to less of it naturally, but it is otherwise symmetric between precision and abstraction. It is only saying that we should pick a lane, not which lane it should be.
I claim that when I look at science academia, I see a bunch of precision directed in inefficient ways, together with a general failure to generalize across pre-defined academic fields, and even more of a failure to generalize out of the field of “science” and into the real world.
Warning: I am mostly conflating abstraction with analogy with lack of precision above, and maybe the point is that we need precise analogies.