Tweetable Rationality
During the latest London Meetup, I asked: “If you could spread one meme about rationality to the mainstream, what would that be?”
I realize that certain parts of rationality, like cognitive biases, should be taught as a unit, but I hypothesize that there exist rationality-enhancing lessons that can fit in 140 characters and stand on their own. Given that we want to spread rationality to those close to us and everyone else as well, it may be useful to work on developing compact versions of our most potent insights, and work on phrasing them in a way that is accessible to the mainstream.
So this thread is a challenge to do just that: pick a rationality-related insight, and try to find 140 characters (or less) that express it well for the purpose of spreading it further. It may be a quote that has appeared in our quotes thread, it may be in the form of a joke, or maybe just a compact insight that can resonate. A non-obvious challenge is to avoid getting evaluated as ‘obviously true’ and discarded. I guess a better target reaction is (“this sounds intriguing”->”huh, I hadn’t thought about this that way!”)
Don’t worry too much about getting it perfect the first time; we can use the threaded comments system to collaborate. If you see a way to improve a sentence, propose the improvement as a response to it. forming a tree of alternative versions, with votes to sort them.
If you see a version of a meme developed somewhere in the thread that reaches your required awesomeness threshold, you can also post it to your (facebook/twitter/whatever else) followers. I certainly will.
Edit: As per Luke’s suggestion, I went and made a twitter account that we can use to tweet good sentences that come out of this thread. Feel free to follow.
For tweetable rationality, I follow stevenkaas, afoolswisdom, michaelvassar, vladimirnesov, and spaceandgames. I’ve noticed that much of what they tweet would not have been comprehensible to me much more than two years ago, though; so inferential distances may place a fairly low bound on the medium’s usefulness as “rationality seeds.”
Linkies for those who don’t wish to type those in by hand as I just did: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Nice job addicting me to five more information sources, you two. Resentfully upvoted.
There’s an atheist named Greta Christina who for a while posted a short message to her blog about atheism, and encouraged all of her readers to copy and paste it to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, to spread the meme. Basically, a 140-character Talking Points Memo.
That might be a good idea here. I’ll be if we had one central thread of daily (or weekly) 140-character rationality ‘thoughts of the day’, we could get a lot of Less Wrongers to reliably spread the same message on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Probably easiest would be to have somebody launch a new Twitter feed and regularly post these things, and then other Less Wrongers could plan on re-tweeting or Facebooking them.
I can make that. The only thing I don’t know is what account name to use.
Twitter has a 15-character limit, suggestions welcome.
Rationalitweet
I slept on it, and this was the exact idea I came up with! Account created. If others want to help maintain it, pm me.
http://twitter.com/#!/Rationalitweet
Bayesian
this one’s taken: https://twitter.com/bayesian
Why not just LessWrong?
I’d be in favor of doing it weekly—when you’re trying to sound profound and insightful Quality >> Quantity.
I think a good rule for these is would be to only post one suggestion per comment so that up/downvoting is more precise.
I think this is a great idea. Just post the tweet with the most upvotes in the thread?
To judge length, you must learn a benchmark to compare with. So too with the strength of evidence, but few know its ruler, probability.
A food sickens you in an hour, you know. In a week, you need notes. In a year, you need a study. Important things often go unnoticed.
Information diet is as important as food diet. Seek sources that teach new things, avoid sources that eat your time but give nothing back.
Learn how minds work, and how they make mistakes. You can’t call a tow if your mind breaks down.
Don’t guess, use numbers. Learn how to turn likelihood, strength of evidence, and goodness into numbers, so you can guess less.
Harvested from Five-minute rationality techniques:
I don’t think that this is very useful. I actually did this for a day or so, but the amount of mental effort that it took to do it was definitely not worth it. I would probably limit it to one level of monitoring, considering that you don’t have a huge amount of computing power to work with.
I find myself doing this with any spare computing power I have. Is it worth the effort to stop?
During the London meetup we also mentioned that this self-questioning may be related to procrastination, and by self-observation I tend to put more weight on it as an explanation.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. —Richard Feynman
The complete quote is “For a successful technology, reality must...”, but I prefer this more general version. It was originally uttered in Feynman’s appendix to the report on the Challenger disaster.
Amusing to see this quote in a discussion about public relations.
Compressing a bit further to leave room for the ‘http://’ prefix would be nice, but this is as far as I could get it.
Here’s my version:
The first sentence could perhaps be eliminated entirely.
Yay! Turns out that making college apps fit into character limits taught me useful skills!
Purely for the PR angle, if we can find stuff that works as RATIONALIST HULK it might be more popular.
I have claimed this twitter account. If someone can do better things with it than I can, please let me know and I’ll hand it over.
Wrote this in some free time during class (similar theme to Dorikka’s):
I figure limericks are good at sticking in someone’s head, even if the structure makes you distort your point a little.
At the end of a line
Put two spaces before hitting enter/return for a linebreak
For a larger linebreak, put two enter/returns
Limericks stick in your head if you actually follow the structure. Do you really see no problem with the syllable stress “How you JUStify IT” or “If it DISagrees WITH data TAken”?
Writing a good limerick is hard. Here’s my best attempt, in which I think the rhythm works, but the second rhyme relies on having the correct regional accent:
Yesterday as a creative activity I spent a couple hours making up tweets. It was actually really fun and cathartic! The last four had something to do with rationality:
Cached Selves
“Anti-game” is quite common and involves being excessively nice thereby signaling very low value. Related to how humans have difficulty modeling others (typical mind fallacy? women are pickier when choosing mates than men)
Related to conjunction fallacy. Inspired by my experiences: more detailed writing with imagery was more effective (perhaps because it seemed more high status)
Hold Off on Proposing Solutions. What looks smart (the confident charisma) isn’t necessarily the smart thing to do. Inspired by personal experiences where political discussions were charisma competitions.
My tweets were too abstract, lacked links to LW or Wikipedia, may have been too obvious and were seen by pretty much noone.
But it sure was fun, so I encourage people to explore Alexandros’ suggestion.
Don’t believe everything that you think.
How do you know what you know is true?
I’m curious to know how people use Twitter and why. Do the tweets you follow pop up automatically on your phone, or do you have to go to the site to read them? What do you get from it? I’ve looked at Twitter a few times, and I’ve yet to see anything that would have repaid the effort of looking for it. What can someone say in 140 characters that you want to read? For things like “Demonstration in Tahrir Square 6pm”, or “Got out of Sendai, crashing with friend in Tokyo” I can see the point, but not talking points without the talk.
I use it because I think and thus write in one-liners. I read it because it’s a nice place to post links and one-liners, and because one can dip into it as one wishes to. I read it just on the site, my girlfriend follows it on her phone as well.
What is it about these tweets that makes me cringe at every one?
This one is probably more useful for people who are already rationalists:
hypotheses that explain lots of futures are worthless. you want hypotheses that explain very few (preferably one) future.
Is this a version of this:
also, the wording of this has always grated on my nerves. I’d much rather it had been worded like this:
I like your formulation.
I’m not sure these are useful for reasons previously given here.
I dislike many of the “rationalist” quotes in the quotes threads because I don’t think that they’re accurate or clear enough, but I think that some of the more simple insights can be communicated this way. Major bonus if you can embed a link to a Sequence post.
Good points.
I feel like its similar to the Dark Arts arguments that we’ve had before, where there’s an accurate idea that doesn’t sound so cool to say and making it cooler to say might make it less accurate.
Agreed. But there’s nothing wrong with a short sentence where something is profound, and sounds so. Making those are tricky
I think the tweets should just have links in them. That way people get a fun aphorism to read and remember, and if they’re interested they can follow through, read the link, and get the fuller picture.
changing my answer:
Reason explicitly!
Don’t protect your ideas, offer them up to others to shred to bits.
Hit them with the strongest hammers you can find.
Be ever disloyal, constantly looking for ways to destroy the castles your reason builds.
Whatever comes through the fire has earned its place in your mind.
If one isn’t already well versed in rationality, I can see this quote as encouraging people to make overconfident predictions on the basis of insufficient evidence.
Fair enough. How about
Better, but I think that we’re still losing too much information in it for this to be useful.
Yeah, I’d be fine if this one just died now. I found it somewhere else then tried to tack some rationality to the end of it, with no particular success.
This doesn’t make sense to me. The presence or absence of evidence does not determine whether a fact exists or not. Evidence refers to the basis for a belief. There can be evidence for non-facts (e.g., opinions), as well as no evidence for facts (e.g., whether the nth heaviest dinosaur that ever existed was doing something that we expect there to be a 50% chance of it doing when it was exactly 1 year old).
~G. K. Chesterton
Edit: I noticed that this was more than 140 characters, but it works fine for Facebook.
Not the most elegant rewording—anyone got anything better?
Tweeted.
Or, using more of the original words.
More direct, more deviation from original quote:
This made me laugh, combined with all the other positive feedback, let’s make it the inaugural tweet of @rationalitweet
When are you doing the next tweet?
I just tweeted the most voted item here, but given the limited uptake of this page, I don’t see this idea becoming self-sustaining. Interested in taking the reins of the account?
Maybe just run the thread once a week in the discussion or something?
I’m just not sure how much demand for it there is.
I found this one a lot funnier and more memorable.
The only downside I can think of is that it might increase inferential distance. Maybe. I feel like most people would still understand it.