Thanks for writing this, it’s a very concise summary of the parts of LW I’ve never been able to make sense of, and I’d love to have a better understanding of what makes the ideas in your bullet-pointed list appealing to those who tend towards ‘rationality realism’. (It’s sort of a background assumption in most LW stuff, so it’s hard to find places where it’s explicitly justified.)
I had a quick look for an online reference to link to before posting this, and couldn’t find anything. It’s not a particularly complicated theory, though: “purple” ideas are vague, intuitive, pre-theoretic; “orange” ones are explicable, describable and model-able. A lot of AI safety ideas are purple, hence why CFAR tells people not just to ignore them like they would in many technical contexts.
I’ll publish a follow-up post with arguments for and against realism about rationality.
Thanks for writing this, it’s a very concise summary of the parts of LW I’ve never been able to make sense of, and I’d love to have a better understanding of what makes the ideas in your bullet-pointed list appealing to those who tend towards ‘rationality realism’. (It’s sort of a background assumption in most LW stuff, so it’s hard to find places where it’s explicitly justified.)
Also:
Is there any online reference explaining this?
I had a quick look for an online reference to link to before posting this, and couldn’t find anything. It’s not a particularly complicated theory, though: “purple” ideas are vague, intuitive, pre-theoretic; “orange” ones are explicable, describable and model-able. A lot of AI safety ideas are purple, hence why CFAR tells people not just to ignore them like they would in many technical contexts.
I’ll publish a follow-up post with arguments for and against realism about rationality.
Or you could say vague and precise.
Thanks for the explanation!
This was my attempt to explain the underlying ideas.