Getting a sense of one’s own history can be really great for having perspective. The primary reason I’ve curated this is because the post really helped give me perspective on the history of this intellectual community, and I imagine also for many other LWers.
I wouldn’t have been able to split it into “General Semantics, analytic philosophy, science fiction, and Zen Buddhism” as directly as you did, nor would I know which details to pick out. (I would’ve been able to talk about sci-fi, but I wouldn’t quite know how to relate the rest of it.)
That said, while I might be wrong, I do think there’s one strand missing here, which is something like “lawful reasoning in physics and mathematics”. I think ET Jaynes mastery of probability theory drives a lot of Eliezer’s approach to rationality and AI, as well as Feynman’s first-principles approach to reasoning, and neither of those authors are discussed except in the books at the end. (I guess they were more of Eliezer’s path than yours.)
(I would be interested in people writing posts that address their historical relevance in a similar way to how Eric has written about other schools of thought here.)
The essay is very readable and somehow isn’t 10x the length filled with extraneous detail, which is a common failure mode with histories. I think that’s because you’ve written this from a personal perspective, which helps a lot. You know which details mattered to you because you lived through it, and I really appreciated reading this history from your perspective. I had never even heard of the book “Gulf”, and now I know I’m going to read it. (The books list at the end is also great.)
Overall I’m delighted to have read this essay, thank you for writing it.
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[1] Curated posts are emailed to the 3000-4000 readers who are subscribed to the twice-weekly curated posts.
Eliezer was more influenced by probability theory, I by analytic philosophy, yes. These variations are to be expected. I’m reading Jaynes now and finding him quite wonderful. I was a mathematician at one time, so that book is almost comfort food for me—part of the fun is running across old friends expressed in his slightly eccentric language.
I already had a pretty firm grasp on Feynman’s “first-principles approach to reasoning” by the time I read his autobiographical stuff. So I enjoyed the books a lot, but more along the lines of “Great physicist and I think alike! Cool!” than being influenced by him. If I’d been able to read them 15 years earlier I probably would have been influenced.
One of the reasons I chose a personal, heavily narratized mode to write the essay in was exactly so I could use that to organize what would otherwise have been a dry and forbidding mass of detail. Glad to know that worked—and, from what you don’t say, that I appear to have avoided the common “it’s all about my feelings” failure mode of such writing.
I’ve curated this essay[1].
Getting a sense of one’s own history can be really great for having perspective. The primary reason I’ve curated this is because the post really helped give me perspective on the history of this intellectual community, and I imagine also for many other LWers.
I wouldn’t have been able to split it into “General Semantics, analytic philosophy, science fiction, and Zen Buddhism” as directly as you did, nor would I know which details to pick out. (I would’ve been able to talk about sci-fi, but I wouldn’t quite know how to relate the rest of it.)
That said, while I might be wrong, I do think there’s one strand missing here, which is something like “lawful reasoning in physics and mathematics”. I think ET Jaynes mastery of probability theory drives a lot of Eliezer’s approach to rationality and AI, as well as Feynman’s first-principles approach to reasoning, and neither of those authors are discussed except in the books at the end. (I guess they were more of Eliezer’s path than yours.)
(I would be interested in people writing posts that address their historical relevance in a similar way to how Eric has written about other schools of thought here.)
The essay is very readable and somehow isn’t 10x the length filled with extraneous detail, which is a common failure mode with histories. I think that’s because you’ve written this from a personal perspective, which helps a lot. You know which details mattered to you because you lived through it, and I really appreciated reading this history from your perspective. I had never even heard of the book “Gulf”, and now I know I’m going to read it. (The books list at the end is also great.)
Overall I’m delighted to have read this essay, thank you for writing it.
--
[1] Curated posts are emailed to the 3000-4000 readers who are subscribed to the twice-weekly curated posts.
Eliezer was more influenced by probability theory, I by analytic philosophy, yes. These variations are to be expected. I’m reading Jaynes now and finding him quite wonderful. I was a mathematician at one time, so that book is almost comfort food for me—part of the fun is running across old friends expressed in his slightly eccentric language.
I already had a pretty firm grasp on Feynman’s “first-principles approach to reasoning” by the time I read his autobiographical stuff. So I enjoyed the books a lot, but more along the lines of “Great physicist and I think alike! Cool!” than being influenced by him. If I’d been able to read them 15 years earlier I probably would have been influenced.
One of the reasons I chose a personal, heavily narratized mode to write the essay in was exactly so I could use that to organize what would otherwise have been a dry and forbidding mass of detail. Glad to know that worked—and, from what you don’t say, that I appear to have avoided the common “it’s all about my feelings” failure mode of such writing.