This may, perhaps, be confounded by the phenomenon where I am one of the last living descendants of the lineage that ever knew how to say anything concrete at all.
I’ve previously noticed this weakness in myself. What lineage did Eliezer learn this from? I would appreciate any suggestions or advice on how to become stronger at this.
This came up with Aysajan about two months ago. An exercise which I recommended for him: first, pick a technical academic paper. Read through the abstract and first few paragraphs. At the end of each sentence (or after each comma, if the authors use very long sentences), pause and write/sketch a prototypical example of what you currently think they’re talking about. The goal here is to get into the habit of keeping a “mental picture” (i.e. prototypical example) of what the authors are talking about as you read.
Early reports from Aysajan are that integration of this exercise into standard reading habits has resulted in a significant step-change improvement in understanding what’s going on in nontrivial technical papers/posts, and also seems to spur a lot more independent thoughts/understanding in response to reading. Don’t know yet how robust/reproducible this is, so if you practice the exercise a bit, please let me know how it goes.
(Fun side note: you can think of this technique as an application of very basic model theory to human rationality.)
A role-playing game where the instructor plays a management consultant whose advice is impressive-sounding but contentless bullshit, and where the class has to force the consultant to be specific and concrete enough to be either wrong or trivial.
People were encouraged to make a habit of saying “can you give an example?” in everyday conversation. I practiced it a lot.
IIRC, Eliezer taught the class in May 2012? He talks about the relevant skills here and here. And then I ran it a few times, and then CFAR dropped it; I don’t remember why.
I would appreciate any suggestions or advice on how to become stronger at this.
(Successfully) debugging complex systems seems to help. Although I don’t know how much of that is actual training and how much of that is survivor bias.
(Why does this help? I hypothesize that it’s because it’s unforgiving. If you come up with a beautiful generic null-set as a hypothesis, you haven’t actually made headway towards solving the problem… so you eventually give up, backtrack, and come up with a concrete hypothesis. You can’t avoid training yourself out of it, essentially, so long as a) you can discipline yourself to keep working on the problem and b) it’s a problem you’re capable of solving.)
Cryptography was mentioned in this post in a relevant manner, though I don’t have enough experience with it to advocate it with certainty. Some lineages of physics (EY points to Feynman) try to evoke this, though it’s pervasiveness has decreased. You may have some luck with Zen. Generally speaking, I think if you look at the Sequences, the themes of physics, security mindset, and Zen are invoked for a reason.
Ah, I forgot to emphasize that these were things to look into to get better. I don’t claim to know EY’s lineage. That said, how many people do you think are well versed in cryptography? If someone said, “I am one of very few people who is well versed in cryptography” that doesn’t sound particularly wrong to me (if they are indeed well versed). I guess I don’t know exactly how many people EY thinks is in this category with him, but people versed enough in cryptography to, say, make their own novel and robust scheme is probably on the order of 1,000-10,000 worldwide. His phrasing would make sense to me for any fraction of the population lower than 1 in 1,000, and I think he’s probably referring to a category at the size of or less than 1 in 10,000. That said, I would like to emphasize that I don’t think cryptography is especially useful to this ends, rather, the reason it was mentioned above was to bring up the security mindset.
Zen/mindfulness meditation generally has an emphasis on noticing concrete sensations. In particular, it might help you interject your attention at the proper level of abstraction to reroute concrete observations and sensations into your language. Also, with all of these examples, I do not claim that any individual one will be enough, but I do believe that experience with these things can help.
One fun way to learn concreteness is something I tried to exercise in this reply: use actual numbers. Fermi estimation is a skill that’s relatively easy to pick up and makes you exercise your ability to think concretely about actual numbers that you are aware of to predict numbers you that are not. The process of actually referencing the concrete observations into a concrete prediction is a pattern that I have found to produce concrete thoughts which get verbalized in concrete language. :)
I’ve previously noticed this weakness in myself. What lineage did Eliezer learn this from? I would appreciate any suggestions or advice on how to become stronger at this.
This came up with Aysajan about two months ago. An exercise which I recommended for him: first, pick a technical academic paper. Read through the abstract and first few paragraphs. At the end of each sentence (or after each comma, if the authors use very long sentences), pause and write/sketch a prototypical example of what you currently think they’re talking about. The goal here is to get into the habit of keeping a “mental picture” (i.e. prototypical example) of what the authors are talking about as you read.
Other good sources on which to try this exercise:
Wikipedia’s list of theorems
Alignment Forum posts
Your own old writing
Early reports from Aysajan are that integration of this exercise into standard reading habits has resulted in a significant step-change improvement in understanding what’s going on in nontrivial technical papers/posts, and also seems to spur a lot more independent thoughts/understanding in response to reading. Don’t know yet how robust/reproducible this is, so if you practice the exercise a bit, please let me know how it goes.
(Fun side note: you can think of this technique as an application of very basic model theory to human rationality.)
CFAR used to have an awesome class called “Be specific!” that was mostly about concreteness. Exercises included:
Rationalist taboo
A group version of rationalist taboo where an instructor holds an everyday object and asks the class to describe it in concrete terms.
The Monday-Tuesday game
A role-playing game where the instructor plays a management consultant whose advice is impressive-sounding but contentless bullshit, and where the class has to force the consultant to be specific and concrete enough to be either wrong or trivial.
People were encouraged to make a habit of saying “can you give an example?” in everyday conversation. I practiced it a lot.
IIRC, Eliezer taught the class in May 2012? He talks about the relevant skills here and here. And then I ran it a few times, and then CFAR dropped it; I don’t remember why.
The specificity sequence I wrote may be helpful.
(Successfully) debugging complex systems seems to help. Although I don’t know how much of that is actual training and how much of that is survivor bias.
(Why does this help? I hypothesize that it’s because it’s unforgiving. If you come up with a beautiful generic null-set as a hypothesis, you haven’t actually made headway towards solving the problem… so you eventually give up, backtrack, and come up with a concrete hypothesis. You can’t avoid training yourself out of it, essentially, so long as a) you can discipline yourself to keep working on the problem and b) it’s a problem you’re capable of solving.)
Cryptography was mentioned in this post in a relevant manner, though I don’t have enough experience with it to advocate it with certainty. Some lineages of physics (EY points to Feynman) try to evoke this, though it’s pervasiveness has decreased. You may have some luck with Zen. Generally speaking, I think if you look at the Sequences, the themes of physics, security mindset, and Zen are invoked for a reason.
If being versed in cryptography was enough, then I wouldn’t expect Eliezer to claim being one of the last living descendents of this lineage.
Why would Zen help (and why do you think that)?
Ah, I forgot to emphasize that these were things to look into to get better. I don’t claim to know EY’s lineage. That said, how many people do you think are well versed in cryptography? If someone said, “I am one of very few people who is well versed in cryptography” that doesn’t sound particularly wrong to me (if they are indeed well versed). I guess I don’t know exactly how many people EY thinks is in this category with him, but people versed enough in cryptography to, say, make their own novel and robust scheme is probably on the order of 1,000-10,000 worldwide. His phrasing would make sense to me for any fraction of the population lower than 1 in 1,000, and I think he’s probably referring to a category at the size of or less than 1 in 10,000. That said, I would like to emphasize that I don’t think cryptography is especially useful to this ends, rather, the reason it was mentioned above was to bring up the security mindset.
Zen/mindfulness meditation generally has an emphasis on noticing concrete sensations. In particular, it might help you interject your attention at the proper level of abstraction to reroute concrete observations and sensations into your language. Also, with all of these examples, I do not claim that any individual one will be enough, but I do believe that experience with these things can help.
One fun way to learn concreteness is something I tried to exercise in this reply: use actual numbers. Fermi estimation is a skill that’s relatively easy to pick up and makes you exercise your ability to think concretely about actual numbers that you are aware of to predict numbers you that are not. The process of actually referencing the concrete observations into a concrete prediction is a pattern that I have found to produce concrete thoughts which get verbalized in concrete language. :)