You are doing some fancy footwork with the labels there. As soon as a post rationality method is describable, repeatable and documentable it woild fit into rationality. But what about the concepts that don’t fit into words so easily. The map-territory bridge problem (describe how to make a bridge between the map and the territory).
Alternative medicine has some interesting features worth investigating (deliberately left vague).
As soon as a post rationality method is describable, repeatable and documentable it woild fit into rationality.
It already fits. For example, in “The Rhythm of Disagreement”, Eliezer talks about the “rhythm” of Bayesian reasoning, the fundamentals that come before any formalised method, that you have to adhere to even if you don’t have any numbers to apply Bayes’ Theorem to. He illustrates this with various examples, rather than laying down a “describable, repeatable and documentable” method. This bears out Raemon’s comment that everything advertised as postrationality is already in Eliezer!rationality. And Eliezer!rationality is the rationality we are concerned with here at LessWrong.
Gosh I hope not. I hope we developed the craft further than the guy who mostly stopped publishing on the site by 2011.
I would appreciate “Lesswrong” not standing in a shadow and instead building on existing work.
I propose that PR is a natural progression from R. (hence the name PR). I expect to see places where R occasionally stretched into places that made space for PR to grow out of.
I would appreciate “Lesswrong” not standing in a shadow and instead building on existing work.
So would I, but I don’t think I’ve seen much that qualifies. There is the work on AGI, but I don’t know how far that has gone, because I don’t follow it (a topic of vital importance that I have chosen to ignore, there being only so many hours in the day). Perhaps CFAR? But they don’t publish, and I have not been to any of their events.
I do think there is a lot of good writing by people who are not Eliezer. At the very least Scott Alexander’s writing, but also Luke’s, Kaj Sotala’s, Anna Salamon’s and many others.
I do think there is a lot of good writing by people who are not Eliezer. At the very least Scott Alexander’s writing, but also Luke’s, Kaj Sotala’s, Anna Salamon’s and many others.
Except that for some techniques I had to step out of rational into “weird” to develop it. For example focusing is a technique in rationality that talks about interior subjective experience of a feeling of a knot of a problem and what could often be referred to the same phenomena as “energy channels”. A very alt-medicine-esque concept. I put focussing more in pr territory than in R territory. Particularly in the mind that developing further techniques needs to be done from a different experiential space.
That is—as Thomas Kuhn suggests in proposing paradigm shifts in the book “the structure of scientific revolutions”, to get novel science we need to do novel experiments with novel apparatuses. To revolutionise what we know, we need to explore something we haven’t already explored.
I think if rationality need to regularly explore concepts that don’t fit into words in order to be successful, then rationality should just not stress out when it can’t put concepts into words.
(It seems that both epistemic and instrumental rationality need this, for different reasons).
My biggest pet peeve with post-rationality (esp. as described as relating to LessWrong) is that it doesn’t seem to be doing anything that Eliezer doesn’t at least point to once in the sequences and say “this seems like it’s going to be important”, even if Eliezer isn’t an expert on it so didn’t have much to say.
I get a lot of flak from rationalists when I try to do stuff in the weird word territory.
It’s clear to me that the delineation is both necessary and helpful for people who are still getting the hang of interpreting weird words and for people well versed to find each other and compare notes.
To mush all PR into R isn’t making anyone happy.
I see R folk complaining about PR.
I see reductionist R folk, trying to deny the existence of PR.
I see PR folk laughing at the problem because of some variation on, “it seems so obvious now”.
I see PR folk bitter and annoyed because to them there is clearly something different that is not easy to delineate.
I see all this and more. We aren’t winning any games of “I mapped it better” by mushing two categories together.
You are doing some fancy footwork with the labels there. As soon as a post rationality method is describable, repeatable and documentable it woild fit into rationality. But what about the concepts that don’t fit into words so easily. The map-territory bridge problem (describe how to make a bridge between the map and the territory).
Alternative medicine has some interesting features worth investigating (deliberately left vague).
It already fits. For example, in “The Rhythm of Disagreement”, Eliezer talks about the “rhythm” of Bayesian reasoning, the fundamentals that come before any formalised method, that you have to adhere to even if you don’t have any numbers to apply Bayes’ Theorem to. He illustrates this with various examples, rather than laying down a “describable, repeatable and documentable” method. This bears out Raemon’s comment that everything advertised as postrationality is already in Eliezer!rationality. And Eliezer!rationality is the rationality we are concerned with here at LessWrong.
Gosh I hope not. I hope we developed the craft further than the guy who mostly stopped publishing on the site by 2011.
I would appreciate “Lesswrong” not standing in a shadow and instead building on existing work.
I propose that PR is a natural progression from R. (hence the name PR). I expect to see places where R occasionally stretched into places that made space for PR to grow out of.
So would I, but I don’t think I’ve seen much that qualifies. There is the work on AGI, but I don’t know how far that has gone, because I don’t follow it (a topic of vital importance that I have chosen to ignore, there being only so many hours in the day). Perhaps CFAR? But they don’t publish, and I have not been to any of their events.
I do think there is a lot of good writing by people who are not Eliezer. At the very least Scott Alexander’s writing, but also Luke’s, Kaj Sotala’s, Anna Salamon’s and many others.
I agree. My earlier judgment was too negative.
Except that for some techniques I had to step out of rational into “weird” to develop it. For example focusing is a technique in rationality that talks about interior subjective experience of a feeling of a knot of a problem and what could often be referred to the same phenomena as “energy channels”. A very alt-medicine-esque concept. I put focussing more in pr territory than in R territory. Particularly in the mind that developing further techniques needs to be done from a different experiential space.
That is—as Thomas Kuhn suggests in proposing paradigm shifts in the book “the structure of scientific revolutions”, to get novel science we need to do novel experiments with novel apparatuses. To revolutionise what we know, we need to explore something we haven’t already explored.
I think if rationality need to regularly explore concepts that don’t fit into words in order to be successful, then rationality should just not stress out when it can’t put concepts into words.
(It seems that both epistemic and instrumental rationality need this, for different reasons).
My biggest pet peeve with post-rationality (esp. as described as relating to LessWrong) is that it doesn’t seem to be doing anything that Eliezer doesn’t at least point to once in the sequences and say “this seems like it’s going to be important”, even if Eliezer isn’t an expert on it so didn’t have much to say.
I get a lot of flak from rationalists when I try to do stuff in the weird word territory.
It’s clear to me that the delineation is both necessary and helpful for people who are still getting the hang of interpreting weird words and for people well versed to find each other and compare notes.
To mush all PR into R isn’t making anyone happy.
I see R folk complaining about PR. I see reductionist R folk, trying to deny the existence of PR. I see PR folk laughing at the problem because of some variation on, “it seems so obvious now”. I see PR folk bitter and annoyed because to them there is clearly something different that is not easy to delineate.
I see all this and more. We aren’t winning any games of “I mapped it better” by mushing two categories together.