Thank you a lot for writing this story. I really enjoyed reading it and am generally very excited to see more rationalist fiction show up on LessWrong.
Thanks for the support! I don’t fully understand the tradeoffs between fiction and nonfiction writing—in particular I wonder how many of the ideas on LW would be better transmitted as fiction:
(1) Fiction is experientially “cost-free” to read whereas nonfiction always incurs some mental tax.
(2) Object-level examples are as good or better than meta-level principles.
(3) Learning by imitation is easier than learning from rules.
Yea, I think rationalists bias towards rule-based learning because it’s more conscious/S2, but much of learning happens via imitation: [find interesting mentor] → [copy their every move wholesale]. Funny example: I learned analytic number theory from an Indian postdoc whom I admire very much and I still think about prime numbers with the slightest of Indian accents.
I think most people are biased towards rule-based learning because it’s how things are taught in school. As far as I can tell learning by imitation is the actual human default.
Thank you a lot for writing this story. I really enjoyed reading it and am generally very excited to see more rationalist fiction show up on LessWrong.
Thanks for the support! I don’t fully understand the tradeoffs between fiction and nonfiction writing—in particular I wonder how many of the ideas on LW would be better transmitted as fiction:
(1) Fiction is experientially “cost-free” to read whereas nonfiction always incurs some mental tax.
(2) Object-level examples are as good or better than meta-level principles.
(3) Learning by imitation is easier than learning from rules.
Whoa, the thing about learning by imitation is really good.
Thanks for making that explicit.
Yea, I think rationalists bias towards rule-based learning because it’s more conscious/S2, but much of learning happens via imitation: [find interesting mentor] → [copy their every move wholesale]. Funny example: I learned analytic number theory from an Indian postdoc whom I admire very much and I still think about prime numbers with the slightest of Indian accents.
I think most people are biased towards rule-based learning because it’s how things are taught in school. As far as I can tell learning by imitation is the actual human default.