Primary sources provide you with the “raw data” or evidence you will use to develop, test, and ultimately justify your hypothesis or claim.
Secondary sources are books, articles, or reports that are based on primary sources and are intended for scholarly or professional audiences.
Tertiary sources are books and articles that synthesize and report on secondary sources for general readers, such as textbooks, articles in encyclopedias, and articles in mass-circulation publications.
The distinction between primary and secondary sources comes from 19th century historians, and the idea of tertiary sources came later. The boundaries can be fuzzy, and are certainly dependent on the task at hand.
I want to reason about what these distinctions look like in the alignment community, and whether or not they’re important.
The rest of chapter five is about how to use libraries and information technologies, and evaluating sources for relevance and reliability.
Chapter 6 starts off with the kind of thing you should be looking for while you read
Look for creative agreement
Offer additional support. You can offer new evidence to support a source’s claim.
Confirm unsupported claims. You can prove something that a source only assumes or speculates about.
Apply a claim more widely. You can extend a position.
Look for creative disagreement
Contradictions of kind. A source says something is one kind of thing, but it’s another.
Part-whole contradictions. You can show that a source mistakes how the parts of something are related.
Developmental or historical contradictions. You can show that a source mistakes the origin or development of a topic.
External cause-effect contradictions. You can show that a source mistakes a causal relationship.
Contradictions of perspective. Most contradictions don’t change a conceptual framework, but when you contradict a “standard” view of things, you urge others to think in a new way.
The rest of chapter 6 is a few more notes about what you’re looking for while reading (evidence, reasons), how to take notes, and how to stay organized while doing this.
The alignment community
I think I see the creative agreement modes and the creative disagreement modes floating around in posts. Would it be more helpful if writers decided on one or two of these modes before sitting down to write?
Moreover, what is a primary source in the alignment community? Surely if one is writing about inner alignment, a primary source is the Risks from Learned Optimization paper. But what are Risks’ primary, secondary, tertiary sources? Does it matter?
Now look at Arbital. Arbital started off to be a tertiary source, but articles that seemed more like primary sources started appearing there. I remember distinctively thinking “what’s up with that?” it struck me as awkward for Arbital to change it’s identity like that, but I end up thinking about and citing the articles that seem more like primary sources.
There’s also the problem of stuff in the memeplex not written down is the real “primary” source while the first person who happens to write it down looks like they’re writing a primary source when in fact what they’re doing is really more like writing a secondary or even tertiary source.
Sources—notes on Craft of Research chapters 5 and 6
Primary, secondary, and tertiary sources
The distinction between primary and secondary sources comes from 19th century historians, and the idea of tertiary sources came later. The boundaries can be fuzzy, and are certainly dependent on the task at hand.
I want to reason about what these distinctions look like in the alignment community, and whether or not they’re important.
The rest of chapter five is about how to use libraries and information technologies, and evaluating sources for relevance and reliability.
Chapter 6 starts off with the kind of thing you should be looking for while you read
Look for creative agreement
Offer additional support. You can offer new evidence to support a source’s claim.
Confirm unsupported claims. You can prove something that a source only assumes or speculates about.
Apply a claim more widely. You can extend a position.
Look for creative disagreement
Contradictions of kind. A source says something is one kind of thing, but it’s another.
Part-whole contradictions. You can show that a source mistakes how the parts of something are related.
Developmental or historical contradictions. You can show that a source mistakes the origin or development of a topic.
External cause-effect contradictions. You can show that a source mistakes a causal relationship.
Contradictions of perspective. Most contradictions don’t change a conceptual framework, but when you contradict a “standard” view of things, you urge others to think in a new way.
The rest of chapter 6 is a few more notes about what you’re looking for while reading (evidence, reasons), how to take notes, and how to stay organized while doing this.
The alignment community
I think I see the creative agreement modes and the creative disagreement modes floating around in posts. Would it be more helpful if writers decided on one or two of these modes before sitting down to write?
Moreover, what is a primary source in the alignment community? Surely if one is writing about inner alignment, a primary source is the Risks from Learned Optimization paper. But what are Risks’ primary, secondary, tertiary sources? Does it matter?
Now look at Arbital. Arbital started off to be a tertiary source, but articles that seemed more like primary sources started appearing there. I remember distinctively thinking “what’s up with that?” it struck me as awkward for Arbital to change it’s identity like that, but I end up thinking about and citing the articles that seem more like primary sources.
There’s also the problem of stuff in the memeplex not written down is the real “primary” source while the first person who happens to write it down looks like they’re writing a primary source when in fact what they’re doing is really more like writing a secondary or even tertiary source.