I think this is an intriguing idea. It reminds me of the discussion of vague language in Superforecasters: the intelligence community put a lot of effort into optimizing language in its reports, such as “possibly”, “likely”, “almost certainly”, etc. only to later realize that they didn’t know what those words meant (in terms of probabilities) even after discussing word choice quite a bit. Someone went around asking analysts what was meant by the words and got very different probabilities from different people. Similarly, being careful about describing epistemic status is likely better than not doing so, but the words may not have as clear a meaning as you think; describing what you actually did seems like a good way to keep yourself honest.
This is sort of stream of conscious-y because I didn’t want to force myself to do so much that I ended up going ‘ugh I don’t have time for this right now I’ll do it later.’
This seems like an important failure mode. People may not be so interested in writing if they also have to indicate their amount of effort. :p
Another problem I see is: “epistemic effort” may not play as well with signalling games as “epistemic status”. Putting your specific efforts out there rather than a degree of confidence can make something look scatter-brained that is actually well-conceived. For example, “thought about it for 5 minutes” on your post doesn’t indicate the degree of support the idea has from background knowledge and experience. Your actual post indicates that. But, the real reasons you think something will work will often be hard to summarize in a small blurb and will instead go into the content of the post itself.
I think what I’ll do is keep using the “epistemic status” tag, starting with a vague status such as “confident” or “speculative”, and then providing more detail with the notion of “epistemic effort” in mind.
Yeah. One thing that’d be very counterintuitive for many is that “thought seriously for 5 minutes” is actually a surprisingly high bar. (i.e. most people do not do that at all).
I also wonder if it might be better to eschew vague labels like “confident” and instead issue more concrete statements like “80% confident this will be useful for X”, in the interest of avoiding the problem you list in the first paragraph.
Integration with existing signaling games is an important concern. I do think it’d be valuable to shift our status norms to reflect “what useful labor actually looks like.” For example, when someone says “I will think seriously about that for 5 minutes”, I actually now have very positive associations with that—I take it to mean that, while it’s not their top priority, they bothered (at all) to evaluate it in “serious mode.”
That may or may not be achievable to shift, but I think ideally our cultural norms / internal status games should help us learn what actually works, and give more transparency on how much time people actually spend thinking about it.
I agree. My knee-jerk reaction “does not play well with signaling games” has a lot to do with how “thought about it for five minutes” looks to someone not familiar with the LW meme about that. This might address my other point as well: perhaps if people were used to seeing things like “thought for 5 minutes” and “did one google search” and so on, they would feel comfortable writing those things and it wouldn’t make people self-conscious. Or maybe not, if (like me) they also think about how non-community-members would read the labels.
I think some beliefs I have that others may not share is that:
a) for the Less Wrong project to succeed, we’ll need to develop a lot of cultural tools that are different from how mainstream society does things, and that may mean it’ll necessarily look weird to outsiders.
b) the Less Wrong brand is, frankly, already pretty thoroughly ruined. Not enough effort was put into PR concerns in the early days. By now, it’s well known as a pretty weird place, and trying to salvage that reputation seems like wasted effort to me. This is almost convenient though, because it means we can now focus mostly on doing what is effective rather than worrying (overly much, anyhow), about what looks weird.
(Epistemic effort: have not actually done anything to validate either of these assumptions, they are just how it seems to me)
So I think it, as far as posts on Less Wrong itself go, it’s totally fine to do things that don’t necessarily interface with outside status games.
I do think it’s also handy to develop cultural tools that are accessible to the rest of the world. On your facebook wall, it’d be nice to have status-tags that other people might want to adopt. Where possible, I do agree that we should cultivate norms on Less Wrong that work well in the rest of the world. But I don’t think we should completely shy away from norms.
I personally don’t have any intuitive sense of “thought about it for 5 minutes” to be a bad thing (especially for the reasons WhySpace describes—it tells people what to expect). And if you’re publishing a major essay that you want to be taken seriously, it’s important that you put more than 5 minutes of thought into it. If you want it to be taken seriously, the option of “actually put in more work that sounds genuinely impressive” is an option.
My reaction was the complete opposite: an excellent signaling tool.
If I just made a connection between 2 things, and want to bounce ideas off people, I can just say Epistemic effort: Thought about it musingly, and wanted to bounce the idea off a few people and no one will judge me for have a partially formed idea. Perhaps more importantly, anyone not interested in such things will skip the article, instead of wasting their time, and feeling the need do discourage my offending low quality post.
I’m not a fan of “brainstorming” in particular, but there really does seem to be a problem that brainstorming is trying to solve, and I think this would help solve it. Refining a diamond in the rough doesn’t have to be a solitary activity; it can be a community task.
“Epistemic status” metadata plays two roles: first, it can be used to suggest to a reader how seriously they should consider a set of ideas. Second, though, it can have an effect on signalling games, as you suggest. Those who lack social confidence can find it harder to contribute to discussions, and having the ability to qualify statements with tags like “epistemic status: not confident” makes it easier for them to contribute without feeling like they’re trying to be the center of attention.
“Epistemic effort” metadata fulfills the first of these roles, but not the second; if you’re having a slow day and take longer to figure something out or write something than normal, then it might make you feel bad to admit that it took you as much effort as it did to produce said content. Nudging social norms towards use of “epistemic effort” over “epistemic status” provides readers with the benefit of having more information, at the potential cost of discouraging some posters.
I think this is an intriguing idea. It reminds me of the discussion of vague language in Superforecasters: the intelligence community put a lot of effort into optimizing language in its reports, such as “possibly”, “likely”, “almost certainly”, etc. only to later realize that they didn’t know what those words meant (in terms of probabilities) even after discussing word choice quite a bit. Someone went around asking analysts what was meant by the words and got very different probabilities from different people. Similarly, being careful about describing epistemic status is likely better than not doing so, but the words may not have as clear a meaning as you think; describing what you actually did seems like a good way to keep yourself honest.
This seems like an important failure mode. People may not be so interested in writing if they also have to indicate their amount of effort. :p
Another problem I see is: “epistemic effort” may not play as well with signalling games as “epistemic status”. Putting your specific efforts out there rather than a degree of confidence can make something look scatter-brained that is actually well-conceived. For example, “thought about it for 5 minutes” on your post doesn’t indicate the degree of support the idea has from background knowledge and experience. Your actual post indicates that. But, the real reasons you think something will work will often be hard to summarize in a small blurb and will instead go into the content of the post itself.
I think what I’ll do is keep using the “epistemic status” tag, starting with a vague status such as “confident” or “speculative”, and then providing more detail with the notion of “epistemic effort” in mind.
Yeah. One thing that’d be very counterintuitive for many is that “thought seriously for 5 minutes” is actually a surprisingly high bar. (i.e. most people do not do that at all).
I also wonder if it might be better to eschew vague labels like “confident” and instead issue more concrete statements like “80% confident this will be useful for X”, in the interest of avoiding the problem you list in the first paragraph.
Integration with existing signaling games is an important concern. I do think it’d be valuable to shift our status norms to reflect “what useful labor actually looks like.” For example, when someone says “I will think seriously about that for 5 minutes”, I actually now have very positive associations with that—I take it to mean that, while it’s not their top priority, they bothered (at all) to evaluate it in “serious mode.”
That may or may not be achievable to shift, but I think ideally our cultural norms / internal status games should help us learn what actually works, and give more transparency on how much time people actually spend thinking about it.
I agree. My knee-jerk reaction “does not play well with signaling games” has a lot to do with how “thought about it for five minutes” looks to someone not familiar with the LW meme about that. This might address my other point as well: perhaps if people were used to seeing things like “thought for 5 minutes” and “did one google search” and so on, they would feel comfortable writing those things and it wouldn’t make people self-conscious. Or maybe not, if (like me) they also think about how non-community-members would read the labels.
I think some beliefs I have that others may not share is that:
a) for the Less Wrong project to succeed, we’ll need to develop a lot of cultural tools that are different from how mainstream society does things, and that may mean it’ll necessarily look weird to outsiders.
b) the Less Wrong brand is, frankly, already pretty thoroughly ruined. Not enough effort was put into PR concerns in the early days. By now, it’s well known as a pretty weird place, and trying to salvage that reputation seems like wasted effort to me. This is almost convenient though, because it means we can now focus mostly on doing what is effective rather than worrying (overly much, anyhow), about what looks weird.
(Epistemic effort: have not actually done anything to validate either of these assumptions, they are just how it seems to me)
So I think it, as far as posts on Less Wrong itself go, it’s totally fine to do things that don’t necessarily interface with outside status games.
I do think it’s also handy to develop cultural tools that are accessible to the rest of the world. On your facebook wall, it’d be nice to have status-tags that other people might want to adopt. Where possible, I do agree that we should cultivate norms on Less Wrong that work well in the rest of the world. But I don’t think we should completely shy away from norms.
I personally don’t have any intuitive sense of “thought about it for 5 minutes” to be a bad thing (especially for the reasons WhySpace describes—it tells people what to expect). And if you’re publishing a major essay that you want to be taken seriously, it’s important that you put more than 5 minutes of thought into it. If you want it to be taken seriously, the option of “actually put in more work that sounds genuinely impressive” is an option.
My reaction was the complete opposite: an excellent signaling tool.
If I just made a connection between 2 things, and want to bounce ideas off people, I can just say Epistemic effort: Thought about it musingly, and wanted to bounce the idea off a few people and no one will judge me for have a partially formed idea. Perhaps more importantly, anyone not interested in such things will skip the article, instead of wasting their time, and feeling the need do discourage my offending low quality post.
I’m not a fan of “brainstorming” in particular, but there really does seem to be a problem that brainstorming is trying to solve, and I think this would help solve it. Refining a diamond in the rough doesn’t have to be a solitary activity; it can be a community task.
“Epistemic status” metadata plays two roles: first, it can be used to suggest to a reader how seriously they should consider a set of ideas. Second, though, it can have an effect on signalling games, as you suggest. Those who lack social confidence can find it harder to contribute to discussions, and having the ability to qualify statements with tags like “epistemic status: not confident” makes it easier for them to contribute without feeling like they’re trying to be the center of attention.
“Epistemic effort” metadata fulfills the first of these roles, but not the second; if you’re having a slow day and take longer to figure something out or write something than normal, then it might make you feel bad to admit that it took you as much effort as it did to produce said content. Nudging social norms towards use of “epistemic effort” over “epistemic status” provides readers with the benefit of having more information, at the potential cost of discouraging some posters.